The persimmon tree and other stories

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME
OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT
FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY

HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE

Cornell University Library
PR 9599.B25P4

The persimmon tree and other stories.

3 1924 013 247 881

A Cornell University
9 Library

The original of tliis bool< is in
tine Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013247881

THE PERSIMMON TREE

AND OTHER STORIES

(By

^M^arjorie ^arnard

THE CLARENDON PUBLISHING COMPANY
SYDNEY

Registsred in Australia for Transmission
through the Post as a Book.

COPYRIGHT

Distributors .

B. G. WHITE, Callaghan House, 391-393 George Street,

Sydney.

Wholly set up and printed in Australia by
BLOXHAM & CHAMBERS PTY. LTD.

SYDNEY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Author wishes to thank : John Fairfax and Sons
Pty. Ltd. for permission to reprint the following stories which
appeared in The Home and The Home Journal. " Arrow of
Mistletoej" " The Persimmon Tree," " The Bride Elect,"
" Beauty is Strength," " Canaries Sometimes Advertise,""
" The Woman Who Did the Right Thing," " It Will Grow
Anywhere," " The Wrong Hat," " Dialogue at the Ballet,"
" The New Dress," " Sunday," " Dry Spell."

The Editor of The Bulletin for permission to reprint
" The Lottery."

The Editor of the ABC Weekly for permission to reprint
" The Dressmaker " and " Fighting in Vienna."

Messrs. Angus & Robertson for permission to use again
" Dry Spell " and " The Persimmon Tree " which appeared in
Coast to Coast.

MARJORIE BARNARD,

CONTENTS

PAGE

Arrow of Mistletoe . .

7

The Bride Elect

.. 15

The Persimmon Tree

.. 21

Beauty is Strength

. . 26

Canaries Sometimes Advertise

. . 37

The Woman Who Did the Right Thing . .

. . 47

It Will Grow Anywhere

.. 55

The Wrong Hat

. . 63

Tinkling Cymbals —

(a) Conversation in a Buffet

. . 66

(6) Conversation in a Tea-room

. . 69

(c) Dialogue at the Ballet

. . 74

The Party

. . 79

Fighting in Vienna . .

. . 85

The Lottery . .

. . 97

Sunday . .

.. 106

The New Dress

..118

Habit

. . 126

The Dressmaker

. . 140

Dry Spell

..152

ARROW OF MISTLETOE

ARROW OF MISTLETOE

Because she loved him she knew when he was dis-
tressed, even when he had successfully hidden it from
himself ; and because she had complete faith in him,
sometimes she was afraid. She never made the least
effort to understand his financial transactions, though he
talked to her enough about them. His imagination — ^he
was a man of creative imagination working in the financial
field — drew stimulus from the lambent trust and love
in her wide, hazel eyes. It led him on. He did things
then and afterwards — but more particularly afterwards —
that a man with a clever wife might not have done.
She certainly reassured him on the point that most
people were fools. She encouraged in him the streak of
bravura which made him so spectacular a figure, by
not recognising it as anything out of the way. All those
companies and trusts and things were his toys. She
never for a monemt imagined that they were real. She
wanted him to be happy. Even being rich was a game
she played to please him. There had been ups and downs,
some of them very declivitous, and they had left their
hidden mark on her. She had learnt to wince. She
might be stupid . She was also sensitive. And she loved
him. She trusted him.

She was in a way quite an asset. Some people, a few,
thought it a curious aberation that a financial genius,
like Gilespie Munro, should openly idolise this slender
little thing with the heart-shaped face of a dehcate child,
and the pretty manners of a well trained debutante.

8 THE PERSIMMON TREE

Others found it touching. No breath of scandal ever
connected his name with any other woman's. The idea
got round that because he was faithful to his wife he
was a decent sort of chap, and a man you could trust.
Astute business men were influenced by the fact. Tough
people are usually sentimental — the harder the head the
softer the heart. It helped to build up confidence. Con-
fidence was Gilespie Munro's raw material. Give him
enough and he could build Xanadu overnight. He could
do marvels with it, not because he was a swindler but
because he was an artist. He believed — and he was long
past believing in anything else- — that the thing you im-
agined was as real as the thing you had, beside being
much better in every other way. There were times in
his career when he had walked the tight rope over chasms
and even the tight rope and been imaginary. So far he
had always reached the other side. It was a matter of
faith, in himself and in others.

Widows thought he was Galahad. That wasn't the
same thing, but it was profitable.

Lisca Munro played her part. She was, if in a rather
original way, her husband's helpmate. She was part of
his curious legend, for it was certainly bizarre for such a
man to live in respectable fehcity with his wife, and to
exhibit to the world not diamonds round her neck but
trust in her eyes.

A career like Gilespie Munro's cannot stand still, nor
can it even move at a moderate pace. The big scale
adventurer must amaze by his audacity, his intrepidity,
his brilliance. His methods must conjure up the imagina-
tion of those he leads and lives upon, yet he must contin-
ually outstrip them. He must make them mad in his
own likeness or there will be nothing on which to float his

ARROW OF MISTLETOE 9

schemes,, but, if they ever catch up to him he becomes
a commonplace and so is ruined. Suspecting the;mselves
they wUl see through him. He must keep them dazzled..
He must increase his light till one day someone notices
that the sun is a black spot beside it and then the word
goes round that things are a little queer, not quite sound.
Just before the war Gilespie Munro reached a crisis in
his affairs. The moment had come when he must trans-
form confidence into faith, the most chancy of miracles
and one that required all his flair, all the sublety of his
most blatant bravura. To clinch his schemes^^the most
stupendous and far reaching his brain had ever con-
ceived— he needed, not argunient but some fabulous
gesture.

The schemes themselves he had created largely in
monologue with Lisca. Pacing up and down the great
gallery of glass and steel overhanging the harbour, that
gave to his home the quality of a luxury liner, he built
up, elaborated, shaped and tested the Idea from its
first conception in his fertile brain. Hour after hour,
day after day, Lisca listened to him and gave him her
attention. It was always like that. He could not, in his
seasons of creativeness, work alone, or on paper. He
must talk and intoxicate himself with talking ; he must
have for his anvil the plasticity of another mind, any
mind, but in practice, it must be Lisca's because in all
the world he only dared trust Lisca completely. She
didn't understand, and even the chinks of her incom-
prehension were stopped with love. She had the best,
the most serviceable kind of faith, the faith that did
not even try to understand.

It was tiring for Lisca, but she was glad. It meant
the breaking of the drought. Something like this was

10 THE PERSIMMON TREE

due and overdue. She knew, she had felt for some time,
that things were going badly with them. There had been
no change in the externals of their life, yet she had felt
everywhere ebbing credit pull like a tide and, though he
had never abated his sales talk, she had sensed distress
and flagging in her husband. Now that was gone. They
would climb again out of their trough. Gil would be
happy and dynamic, and the tide of money would come
pouring in again.

The Idea had taken shape before her eyes like a vast
cumulus. Monopoly Mortgage. A Creditors' Combine.
The compounding of securitites on the grand scale for
fixed incomes, the piecing together from them of a far-
reaching hold over industry, swamping of boards, control
of banks through the massing of overdrafts till the fi-
nancial system became the inevitable plaything of one
overgrown debtor. Power treated like money, and money
treated like power. Shareholders subscribing not money,
but securitites. Power leased to poUticians and interest
collected in parliamentary, not tretisury, bills.

Out of the fiery nebula something cold and implacable
was eventually shaped. Gilespie Munro began to organise.
Of course the law would have to be altered but that
was not difficult if the right people were interested. In-
volve enough of the right people — the really powerful
people — those with most to lose, and the scheme was
safe. They would safeguard it as part of Their Order.
They must protect themselves. The others, the share-
holders, would be necessary padding. So Gilespie Munro
sent out his bright young men to work every field, set
up his screen of publicity, pursuaded men to work for
him who had no idea they were working for him, alien-
ated those whose hostiUty would be useful, sowed strange

ARROW OF MISTLETOE 11

seed in many furrows, created a legend and wrote a
prospectus. . . .

The Idea came back to him from a hundred sources.
Monopoly Mortgage was in the air. It wore the face of
Financial Salvation. It became the Investor's Dream.
Gil had his mass backing. It remained only to storm the
inner circle of half a dozen men, and of these only one
or two mattered. Even in them the artist was hidden
somewhere and so they were, or should be, susceptible
to magic. One man in particular Gilespie Munro believed
to be the key and pivot. If he were convinced, the rest
would follow. To convince him he would sweep him off
his feet by some unrelated and unexpected tactic.
Gesture not argument.

And so Gilespie Munro planned, with the daring of
simplicity, his fabulous dinner party. It was to be a
display of power as surely as a Roman triumph. The
hundred most powerful men in the city — and their wives
— were to eat his salt. A hundred mugs. And what
salt ! They could sprinkle gold dust on their food and
it would be cheap. Everything about this dinner, but
particularly its costliness, should amaze, dazzle and
intoxicate.

He expounded all the details to Lisca with an en-
thusiasm that she did not find contagious. For the first
time she was alarmed. This was something she under-
stood. Millions would not have disturbed her, they would
have floated serenely over her head, no more real than
toy balloons, but this dinner was going to cost money,
money you could see. She was appalled by the amount.
She knew for a certain fact that they had not enough
money, that this was a wild and desperate business. The
precariousness of their world was first revealed to her in

12 THE PERSIMMON TREE

this dinner party. Her heart sickened with fear, notf
for herself but for Gil. *

She protested hesitantly. " But, Gil, the money. We
can't possibly afford it."

He laughed at her childishness, her dear naivete.

" Money isn't real, my dear, only thinking makes it so."

Lisca was not comforted. He took no notice. He
went on telling her and telling her all about it and it
grew in the telling. He pointed to one name on the list
of guests.

" That's the important man — ^the one we have to
dazzle."

Lisca shrank. She thought she would have to sit be-
side this man and be part of the dazzlement.

Gil reassured her. " Oh no, you go in with the
Cabinet Minister. This old fellow." He flipped another
name contemptously. " You don't treat really im-
portant people as if they were important. Let them
think that you don't know. He'll sit here." He pressed
his little finger on a carefully chosen spot on the plan.
" He will have the best view of ever3d:hing and yet not
feel himself singled out,"

Lisca acquiesced, but her unhappiness grew. This
dinner would ruin them. She steeled her courage to go
through with it.

When the day came it found her adequate. The
Important Man bowing over her hand found her altogether
charming. In greeting scores of people she had kept her
sincerity. She wore only the subtlest touch of make up
and round her delicate throat only a single string of
pearls. Among the hundred bedizened women she was a
rarity.

ARROW OF MISTLETOE 13

The Important Man sat in his carefully chosen seat
and watched the spectale with interest. He ate the
stupendous food with amusement. He looked and he
listened and congratulated himself on being at the top
of his form. He decided that he was the only detached
person present, the only mind that retained its objectivity.
All the others, not excluding his .host, had allowed them-
selves to be dazzled. The tho;ught put him in a high
good temper. The whole thing plucked at his imagination
and indulgently he let it. Gilsepie Munro could organise
victory. He'd hand him that. He was a man who Brought
Things Off and wasn't that the whole secret ? Maybe he
had brought something new into the world of finance.
There wasn't much doubt about the cogency of the Idea
but would it work ? If it worked it succeeded. But was
there enough confidence in all the world to float it ? The
foods, the wines, the scents, the pageantry wrought upon
him. The man was a magicajn. This thing was bizarre,
incredible but perfect. It was only a sample, of course . . .
He saw through it, naturally. Munro obviously intended
him to. . . . All these people dazzled silly by a spot of
display. A nice little allegory. Clever. He'd split the
difference between their credulity and his, shown him
how easy it was to move them, harness them up, these
important people. Between us, Munro and I could clean
up the lot. . . .

The Important Man looked about him. He had the
habit of weighing everything. As one man of imagination
trying out another he tested every detail for a flaw. In
every dish and under every table he looked for his host's
feet of clay and did not find them. He could not have
organised a great coup better himself. His glance re-
turned to what he considered the crowning touch.

14 THE PERSIMMON TREE

He saw the white face of Lisca Munro, her anguished
eyes, her trembling hps;

He followed her gaze. Four waiters were ceremonially
carrying in a magnificent set piece. Shoulder high, with
slow pomp, as if it were the ark of the covenant, they
bore a crowning edifice of spun sugar and ice, wonder
of this pastry cook's art, miraculously surrounded by
flames. The diners were all spellbound for a moment
then staffed to clap with joy.

THE BRIDE ELECT 15

THE BRIDE ELECT

The afternoon of the first hot day of spring hung heavy
as a drop about to fall. There was a feehng of departure
in the air. "A last supperish sort of day," Myra thought.
From the sheds a quarter of a mile away where the
shearing would begin to-morrow there came a confused
clamour. Myra was not sufficiently used to country
noises to know if these were normal sounds or not. Jim
would cock his head and say " That sounds like Benny
with the tractor in the boundary paddock," and Thea
would answer critically " It sounds more like O'SuUivan
to me," when, probably, Myra could hear nothing at al).
This confused noise, like a cloud of dust shot through
with the sharp yapping of dogs, hung on the rim of the
golden afternoon like the faint blur of irritation that
had settled on Myra's happiness. It only seemed to
emphasise the quiet that hung over the homestead. A
plump black Orpington had found her way into the
garden and was scratching complacently among Thea's
seedlings. She was the only living creature that stirred
about the place. The maids had gone over to their own
quarters and wouldn't be back till Ruby came to get
the afternoon tea. All the life of the homestead had
drained down to the sheds. The kennels under the pepper
tree, where the dogs were tied, were empty. They had
gone, out rabbiting with Benny. Laddie, the sheep dog,
who was never tied up, had followed Jim down to the
sheds.

Thea was somewhere about, Myra supposed, but she
did not want Thea. They had long ago run out of things •
to talk about. They had nothing in common, except

16 THE PERSIMMON TREE

Jim. Thea resented her, Myra knew. She did not think
that she would make Jim a good wife. She hated her
dehcacy. And it was that that Jim loved, her exquisite
fraility, her helplessness. Thea thought Jim ought to
have a sensible wife. Of course Thea had been very
kind to her in her brusque way — but you could hear
everything in this shell of a wooden house. There was a
fragment ot conversation that stuck like a thorn in
Myra's memory. Thea's voice saying, " You know it
never does work. A city girl doesn't settle down happily
in the country. And a delicate one — ^They never fit in,"
and then abruptly, irritably, as if pushing an irrelevancy
out of her path, " Oh, I know she's lovely." It really
didn't matter what Thea thought, for Thea would not
tie here when they were married. She had said in her
forthright way, "I'll be off as soon as the hone5nnoon is
over." Jim needn't feel unhappy about her. Something
hardened and stiffened in Myra. Jim was a dear, big
softie. He'd mumbled something about Thea loving the
place, growing up there. Perhaps he hoped Myra would
ask her to stay. That sort of thing never did work. Thea
had married. She hadn't loved the place enough to stop
her marrying away from it. She had a life of her own
and two boys and a girl at boarding school. Let her go
and live it. Thea wasn't M5n:a's idea of a poor, helpless,
widow woman. Still, she would rather Thea had liked
her. She was Jim's sister. Everyone liked her except
Thea and Laddie.

How the afternoon dragged on ! It was her last.
To-morrow she would be gone. She could not help feeling
a little aggrieved that Jim had left her alone this after-
noon, and she had been irritated too by the way he had
excused himself, anxious to point out how important
his work was as if she might make a fuss like a child. It

THE BRIDE ELECT 17

was the shearing, of course no one talked of anything,
else, the weather, the clip, the arrangements. It- was all
so important. It made her feel an outsider, as if she were
wilfully being excluded. It made her even doubt if she
were, after all, the pivot of Jim's life. Next year, when
they were married, it would be her shearing too.

M5^a was at a loose end. She wished now that she
had asked Jim to get down her trunk so that she could
pack. That trunk had been a surprise to Jim when it
had been lugged out of the guard's van on to the siding.
He'd whistled. Three suit cases and a trunk. He must
have expected her to travel with just a bluey. He'd
had to send the utility truck in for the luggage. But he
had liked the frocks that came out of.it. Her pretty
things were always a lovely, exciting mystery to him. If
only she had the trunk down now she could pack. Jim had
swung it up there on the top of the wardrobe to be out
of the way. It didn't seem to weigh anything iii his
hands, but, if she were to try to pull it down herself,
she'd have an heart attack. She loved Jim's strength,
it was like a strong wall about her. And Jim loved her
weakness. Jim was going to make her really safe at last.

Myra moved idly out on to the verandah. The commo-
tion down at the sheds irked her. It had only been going
on for a few minutes, but it seemed to have been hammer-
ing at her nerves for hours. It sounded ominous, urgent,
as if something was happening. Myra hated any sort of
violence. It shivered and scattered the "delicate world
that she collected about her and that she needed. Thea
belonged in that rough alien world, she could always
turn out in an emergency and help the men. She always
knew what to do, she had a whole world of values that
were Greek to Myra. She had let her skin become
weathered and her hands coursened, and yet somehow

18 THE PERSIMMON TREE

everyone valued Thea. She made it quite clear to Myra
that she was an outsider but no one seemed to notice
her rudeness, not even Jim. Thea had them bluffed.
Myra knew that Thea was unassailable, that while Thea
was there, she too would have to subscribe to this legend
of her being wonderful, or be accused of feminine jealousy.
What about Thea's feminine jealousy ? It was so obvious
that Myra could have laughed. But Thea was going
away. It was Jim's world too, but Jim wore it with a
sort of flourish. He brought it to her and laid it at her
feet. It was, in some odd way. Laddie's world more
than anyone's. Laddie, Uke Thea, did not want or trust
Myra, and Myra minded Laddie's polite hostility more
than Thea's. Laddie really was unassailable. Jim valued
him more, Myra thought, than it was reasonable to value
a dog. He was a Scotch Collie with lion coloured head
and paws, a darker back and great plumy tail, not a big
dog, getting old, and very gentle. He had beautiftil
manners, and was a good sheep dog. He would only
work for Jim, no one else had ever handled him. Myra
wanted to be friends with Laddie, he seemed an easy
conquest. He stood politely still when she patted him,
rolling up his eyes at Jim as much as to say, "Is this
alright ?" When she had offered him food from her plate
the table he had refused it, turning away his head. She had
felt rebuked. There had been an odd little smile on
Thea's face. Laddie wouldn't go with her down through
the orchard to fetch the mail. " He never follows anyone
but me," Jim had explained. " He's a one man dog.
All good sheep dogs are." Jim hadn't tried to help her,
he hadn't ordered Laddie to go with her. He had in a
way taken Laddie's side.

She had even, just as if she were curr5dng favour with
the dog, taken his side against Jim when she thought

THE BRIDE ELECT 19

Jim harsh with him. " He's a working dog," Jim
had explained, " you mustn't spoil him." There even
was something sacrosanct about sheep dogs, something
that she, an outsider, must not tamper with.

Myra leaned on the verandah rail and looked over the
country. It was beautiful and she loved it. It was wide
and gentle and good. She knew that she was going to be
happy here, it soothed her at once. The house stood on
a hill facing east, it was surrounded by a half circle of
wattles, tarnished now to bronze, but the view in front
was left clear. The garden sloped down into the neglected
orchard, the almond trees were in leaf, the peached and
the plums in bloom, the wedge of vineyard, without a
single bud, looked blue. Beyond was rising ground
again, patched with the red of fallow, the bright green of
young wheat, and neutral sheep-coloured paddocks,
tussocky so that even in the distance they had texture.
(She must learn to hate No. 10 wire grass.) Beyond
again were brown-green hills on which a scattering of
trees showed like blue pom-poms. Here and there was a
silvery patch of water, a dam, and the big white silos by
the siding looked like a chateau. Myra knew that nobody
saw this scene with quite her eyes. It meant something
different to her. She knew it, coming fresh to it, in a
way they did not. And it flattered her, this big fertile
countryside. It made her feel like a changeling, a fairy
child.

Jim had been so anxious for her to like it, so eager for
it to please her. " It's not always like this," he warned
her. In the summer it was burnt brown — a brown purple
like the Arizona desert, she thought, never having seen
the Arizona desert. There were dust storms and heat.
Well, if it were too bad she could not stand it. Jim

20 THE PERSIMMON TREE

would have to send her to the coast for her health. She
couldn't stand much, so she didn't have to.

The noise had died down but it still, to Myra's sensitive
perceptions, seemed to leave a bruise on the air. She
walked through the quiet house. Someone was running
up from the sheds. It was Jim. She saw with horror
that his arms and hands were wet with blood. She went

towards him. " Jim, dear " He didn't seem to see

her, almost pushed her aside. " Thea," he called. " Thea."
Thea came quickly out of her room carr3dng a bottle and
a roll of linen. " I heard," she said, " I was just coming."

"It's Laddie. The shearers' dogs got him, the whole
pack on him."

They hurried away together. Myra could not feel even
an echo of their consternation. She stood alone in the
sickly quiet. She felt angry, baffled, despoiled. She
went to her room, brought a chair to the wardrobe and,
climbing upon it, began to pull and drag at her trunk.

Jim knelt beside her holding her head on his knees.
Thea was pouring a teaspoonful of brandy, from the
bottle she had carried down to the sheds, between Myra's
blue lips. With difficulty she raised her heavy lids and
looked at Jim. He was almost distracted with anxiety,
but now it was all for her. She tried to speak, he bent
close to hear. " Laddie ?" she asked.

" Hush, darling, don't try to talk." But the question
in her eyes was insistent. " We couldn't do anything
for poor old Laddie," he told her.

She let her lids fall. The tears trickled down her white
cheeks from under them.

" Don't cry, darling," he pleaded in an agonised voice,
" Laddie was only a dog."

THE PERSIMMON TREE 21

THE PERSIMMON TREE

I saw the spring come once and I won't forget it. Only
once. I had been ill all the winter and I was recovering.
There was no more pain, no more treatments or visits
to the doctor. The face that looked back at me from my
old silver mirror was the face of a woman who had
escaped. I had only to build up my strength. For that
I wanted to be alone, an old and natural impulse. I had
been out of things for quite a long time and the effort of
returning was still too great. My mind was transparent
and as tender as new skin. Everything that happened,
even the commonest things, seemed to be happening for
the first time, and had a delicate hollow ring like music
played in an empty auditorium.

I took a flat in a quiet, blind street, lined with English
trees. It was one large room, high ceilinged with pale
walls, chaste as a cell in a honey comb, and furnished
with the passionless, standardised grace of a fashionable
interior decorator. It had the afternoon sun which I
prefer because I like my mornings shadowy and cool, the
relaxed end of the night prolonged as far as possible.
When I arrived the trees were bare and still against the
lilac dusk. There was a block of flats opposite, discreet,
well tended, with a wide entrance. At night it lifted its
oblongs of rose and golden light far up into the sky. One
of its windows was immediately opposite mine. I noticed
that it was always shut against the air. The street was
wide but because it was so quiet the window seemed
near. I was glad to see it always shut because I spend a
good deal of time at my window and it was the only one
that might have overlooked me and flawed my privacy.

22 THE PERSIMMON TREE

I liked the room from the first. It was a shell that
fitted without touching me. The afternoon sun threw
the shadow of a tree on my light wall and it was in the
shadow that I first noticed that the bare twigs were
beginning to swell with buds. A water colour, pretty
and innocuous, hung on that wall. One day I asked the
silent woman who serviced me to take it down. After
that the shadow of the tree had the wall to itself and
I felt cleared and tranquil as if I had expelled the last
fragment of grit from my mind.

I grew familiar with all the people in the street. They
came and went with a surprising regularity and they all,
somehow, seemed to be cut to a very correct pattern.
They were part of the mise en scene, hardly real at all
and I never felt the faintest desire to become acquainted
with any of them. There was one woman I noticed,
about my own age. She lived over the way. She had
been beautiful I thought, and was still handsome with a
fine tall figure. She always wore dark clothes, tailor made,
and there was reserve in her every movement. Coming
and going she was always alone, but you felt that that
was by her own choice, that ever5^hing she did was by her
own steady choice. She walked up the steps so firmly,
and vanished so resolutely into the discreet muteness of
the building opposite, that I felt a faint, a very faint,
envy of anyone who appeared to have her Hfe so per-
fectly under control.

There was a day much warmer than anything we had
had, a still, warm, milky day. I saw as soon as I got up
that the window opposite was open a few inches, 'Spring
comes even to the careful heart,' I thought. And the
next morning not only was the window open but there
was a row of persimmons set out carefully and precisely
on the sill, to ripen in the sun. Shaped like a young.

THE PERSIMMON TREE 23

woman's breasts their deep, rich, golden-orange colour,
seemed just the highlight that the morning's spring tran-
quillity needed. It was almost a shock to me to see them
there. I remembered at home when I was a child there
was a grove of persimmon trees down one side of the house.
In the autumn they had blazed deep red, taking your
breath away. They cast a rosy light into rooms on that
side of the house as if a fire were burning outside. Then
the leaves fell and left the pointed dark gold fruit clinging
to the bare branches. They never lost their strangeness' —
magical, Hesperidean trees. When I saw the Fire Bird
danced my heart moved painfully because I remembered
the persimmon trees in the early morning against the dark
windbreak of the loquats. Why did I always think of
autumn in springtime ?

Persimmons belong to autumn and this was spring. I
went to the window to look again. Yes, they were there,
they were real. I had not imagined them, autumn fruit
warming to a ripe transparency in the spring sunshine.
They must have come, expensively packed in sawdust,
from California or have lain all winter in storage. Fruit
out of season.

It was later in the day when the sun had left the sill
that I saw the window opened and a hand come out to
gather the persimmons. I saw a woman's figure against
the curtains. She lived there. It was her window opposite
mine.

Often, now the window was open. That in itself was
like the breaking of a bUd. A bowl of thick cream pottery,
shaped like a boat, appeared on the sill. It was planted,
I think, with bulbs. She used to water it with one of
those tiny, long-spouted, hand-painted cans that you
use for refilling vases, and I saw her gingerly loosening

24 THE PERSIMMON TREE

the earth with a silver table fork. She didn't look up
or across the street. Not once.

Sometimes on my leisurely walks I passed her in the
street. I knew her quite well now, the texture of her skin,
her hands, the set of her clothes, her movements. The
way you know people when you are sure you will never be
put to the test of speaking to them. I could have found
out her name quite easily. I had only to walk into the
vestibule of her block and read it in the list of tenants,
or consult the visiting card on her door. I never did.

She was a lonely woman and so was I. That was a
barrier, not a link. Lonely women have something to
guard. I was not exactly lonely. I had stood my Ufe on
a shelf, that was all. I could have had a dozen friends
round me all day long. But there wasn't a friend that I
loved and trusted above all the others, no lover, secret
or declared. She had, I suppose, some nutrient hinter-
land on which she drew.

The bulbs in her bowl were shooting. I could see the
pale new-green spears standing out of the dark loam. I
was quite interested in them, wondered what they would
be. I expected tulips, I don't know why. Her window
was open all day long now, very fine thin curtains hung
in front of it and these were never parted. Sometimes
they moved but it was only in the breeze.

The trees in the street showed green now. thick with
budded leaves. The shadow pattern on my wall was in-
tricate and rich. It was no longer an austere winter
pattern as it had been at first. Even the movement of
the branches in the wind seemed different. I used to lie
looking at the shadow when I rested in the afternoon.
I was always tired then and so more permeable to im-
pressions. I'd think about the buds, how pale and tender

THE PERSIMMON TREE 25

they were, but how implacable. The way an unborn child
is implacable. If man's world were in ashes the spring
would still come. I watched the moving pattern and
my heart stirred with it in frail, half-sweet melancholy.

One afternoon I looked out instead of in. It was growing
late and the sun would soon be gone, but it was warm.
There was gold dust in the air, the sunlight had thickened.
The shadows of trees and buildings fell, as they some-
times do on a fortunate day, with dramatic grace. She was
standing there just behind the curtains, in a long dark
wrap, as if she had come from her bath and was going
to dress, early, for the evening. She stood so long and so
still, staring out, — at the budding trees, I thought — that
tension began to accumulate in my mind. My blood
ticked like a clock. Very slowly she raised her arms and
the gown fell from her. She stood there naked, behind
the veil of the curtains, the scarcely distinguishable but
unmistakeable form of a woman whose face was in
shadow.

I turned away. The shadow of the burgeoning bough
was on the white wall. I thought my heart would break.

26 THE PERSIMMON TREE

BEAUTY IS STRENGTH

She was a quarter of an hour late. She said haught-
ily, " I have an appointment. Mrs. Cedric Berrington."
The girl's smile was as mechanical as the waves in her
silver gilt hair. " Come this way, please. Madam."

The usual cubicle, cream matchboard walls, the basin
with its barrage of taps and sprays, the big mirror, the
sterilizing cabinet, not functioning, the chair, the pene-
tential stool, the shelf with its powder streaked runner,
bowl of clips, mat of invisible hairpins, row of friction
perfumes, tattered copy of " Vogue." Over it a pall of
soapy, steamy scent and the drone of a drier making
the perpetual heavy summer afternoon of a hair-
dressing salon. Ida Barrington wondered how many
permanent waves she had had. She felt that she had
been in places like this far too often. A woman's age
could be reckoned in perms. When you once began you
couldn't stop.

She took off her hat and unscrewed her earrings. She
needed this one. The wave was right out. The locks lay
dank against her head. A sleepless night always took the
life out of her hair. It was part of the weariness of being
over forty that you daren't have any emotions, they
took it out of your looks too much. A month at the
beach hadn't done her hair any good either. It hadn't
been a good holiday, too rackety, everyone being bright
all the time. If the others kept it up you couldn't drop
out. She would rather, after all, have stayed at home
with Ced. When he had urged her to go she'd taken it
for granted that he was being generous as he always

BEAUTY IS STRENGTH 27

was. What a fool she'd been. It put you at a disadvan-
tage when your hair went phut.

Madamoiselle Paulette came in. She was petite,
gamine, thirtyish, and had used her natural ugliness to
the best possible advantage. They summed one another
up instantly. Ida thought, " Not French, not Paulette,
certainly not madamoiselle." Madamoiselle thought suc-
cinctly, " Wooden doll with the lacquer beginning to
peel." These reflections in no way affected their inter-
course. Women like this respect one another's bluff.

Madamoiselle prattled. She praised everything, espec-
ially her own services. " Yes^ yes, of course, it needs it,
but I can see just how it should be done. A big wave
here, here, at the back tailored, and here a single row of
sculptured curls. You see how it will be, so chic ? So
sophisticated, no ? Madam is fortunate. The more
fashionable the style the better it suits her. Madam has
such a beautiful head, so small, so elegant. Madam will
be entranced with what I do for her." It was the re-
assurance you bought in fashionable shops. Like a drug
it began to take effect on Ida's sagging nerves. " Madam
was recommended to come to me by a friend, is it not ?"

Ida said slowly, " Mrs. Bertie Chadwick is one of your
customers."

" Ah yes, the so charming Mrs. Chadwick, so pretty,
so sw-eet," Madamoiselle met eyes like swords in the
mirror. She sighed. " If only Madam would use her
influence. It is no pleasure at all to dress Mrs. Chadwick's
hair. Those braids round the head. I ask you. They
date. Really I am ashamed. It is so hausfrau." And she
twisted her httle pug face into a grimace that effectu-
ally drove out the golden image of Viola Chadwick.

" Alors " — Madamoiselle was gone and a silent girl in
white instantly replaced her. Ida was led to the basin,

28 THE PERSIMMON TREE

shampooed, sprayed, dipped by strong mechanical
hands, and returned dripping, swathed in a mackintosh
cape and towels, to the chair in front of the mirror. Her
hair black and spiky with water looked a depressing,
meagre wisp. Her complexion had suffered radically
from the steam. "What a hag," she thought. "Oh, what
a hag."

The girl adjusted the drier like a high Egyptian helmet,
laid the copy of " Vogue " in her lap, and departed
briskly. Her hair stirred in the hot blast, the noise
droned in her ears. The headache which she had beaten
back with aspirin began again. There was a patch of
wimpering nerves in her right temple the size of a penny
and slowly spreading. But the worst thing was looking
in the mirror. Her face suspended between the helmet
and the mackintosh cape was just face, without aids or
garnishings. It was from moments like these, when you
saw your face isolated, that you learned the truth about
it. Her mouth looked hard and disappointed, and round
each corner there was clearly discernable, in this impartial
light, a little bracket of wrinkle. You can't, she had
read somewhere, do anything about wrinkles once they
are visible to the naked eye. Her cheek bones looked
high and stiff and on her throat, where age first shows
itself, the working of the muscles showed too clearly, and
the skin just under the chin was ever so slightly puckered.

The evidence in the mirror was germane to the weight
on her mind. It was thus that she had always envisaged
defeat, other women's, not her own. Cut off momen-
tarily from everything except the mirror and the whirr
of the drier, her mind was forced back again into last
night's ditch. But now the pace was heavier. She was
sure, with a leaden certainty, about Ced and Viola.

BEAUTY IS STRENGTH 29

The shreds of evidence were working like splinters in
her brain. There was the letter addressed to Ced lying
on the table with the other mail when she came in yester-
day afternoon. She recognised Viola's handwriting at
once, large, eager, rather unformed. It didn't surprise
her much, for Viola was in constant need of expression.
She was for ever telephoning her friends about some new
enthusiasm, writing little notes, cop}dng sentiments that
pleased her, out of the novels she read into arty leather
note books. But this wasn't a little note. It was bulky ;
even in Viola's sprawling script, a long letter. She had
weighed it speculatively and put it by with an open mind.
She wasn't, she often told people — particularly Ced — a
jealous wife, nor would she be but for the possessive
streak as strong in her. as instinct in an animal.

She had gone through the house, the housemaid silent
and insolently correct at her heels. In every room she
stopped to alter something. It wasn't that the rooms had
fallen away from the immaculate perfection that she
demanded. It was there shining and clear, but every-
thing was nevertheless different. She knew that at once.
It was the only kind of sensitiveness she had. In a month
the house had slipped away from her dominance whilst
maintaining the form of her taste. No one else's taste
had been substituted, it had merely been lived in by
people who thought differently and felt differently from
herself, and their indifferent hands had communicated
this to every object of decoration or use that stood in it.
This kijowledge drew a web over her spirit. She would
take the house back but, returning from that unsatis-
factory holiday with her hair out of curl and her skin
tarnished by the strong salt air, she had reahsed for the
first time the burden these constant adjustments to the
status quo could be. The thought, like a drop of water.

30 THE PERSIMMON TREE

had condensed in her mind, "From now on it will get
harder and harder just to keep things as they are."

That hadn't anything to do with the letter. In fact,
she had forgotten it until she found something else. But
that wasn't anything in itself either. The laundry had
come back and his clean clothes were lying on Ced's bed,
not yet put away. Three dress shirts. And he'd said he'd
been nowhere. He wasn't the sort of man to dress for
his own edification. He always grumbled at getting into
a boiled shirt but he looked his best in evening dress.
How often the sight of his solid conventional grace had
pleased her with its final tightness. To see those three
new-laundered shirts was like picking up a bird's feather
bright with the tell-tale mating colours. Had Betty
seen it that way too, and was there a quickly, but not
too quickly, concealed glint in her eye ?

At dinner she had asked Ced, as naturally she might :
" What had Viola to say ?"

There had been an almost imperceptible pause. " Just
a note to say that Bertie had to go to Melbourne and
wouldn't be along for golf on Saturday and to ask when
you'd be back."

" Why didn't she phone ?"

" How do I know ?" There was a trace of irritation
under the casual words.

Ced was outwardly the same as ever but she was in-
creasingly aware of a subtle change in him, Uke the one
that she had felt in the house. The evening hung heavily
between them, and when she went to her room there had
been none of the rather apologetic overtures — more apolo-
getic, less passionate with the years — she had expected.
" I expect you're tired, my dear," he had said. " I'll say
good-night."

BEAUTY IS STRENGTH 31

Lying in bed, suspicion began to tick louder and louder
in her brain. Her nerves at the moment were fertile soil
for doubt. She couldn't relax, her eyes seemed to be held
open by springs. Across the landing she heard Ced
undressing and pottering about his room in a leisurely
fashion. Presently he went into the bathroom, and she
heard the water flowing. She hardly told herself what
she was going to do as she crossed to his room. She
hunted for the letter swiftly, thoroughly, silently. She
even went through his suit encountering in all their
innocency the personal oddments that fill a man's
pockets. The letter was not there ; it was not in the room
unless it was hidden in some fantastic place. She ran
downstairs in her bare, feet and hunted again in all the
likely places without success. When she returned to her
room the water was running out of the bath. She crept
into bed humiliated by the blatant vulgarity of what she
she had done. He had destroyed the letter or hidden it
securely or — and. fantastically this hurt her most — taken
it into the bathroom with him.

Other thoughts began to assemble. Why exactly had
Ced stayed behind when she went to the beach ? All she
could remember was something vague about business.
Why, for that matter, had they been seeing so much of
the Chadwick's for the last year ? Bertie was dumb and
played a shocking game, and she had never really liked
Viola — she was too. ...too easy.. .so sweet, so indolent for
all her eagerness, so romantic, so untidy in her mind, so
quick to enthuse and forget.... She hadn't asked herself
before Mv^y they went about with the Chadwick's. It
must have been of somebody's volition, not hers. People
weren't so important, just coloured counters in the game.
It was the game that mattered, the complex game of
fashionable living, that had to be played just right.

32 THE PERSIMMON TREE

Viola and Bertie did the same things, knew the same
people as they did, they fitted into the pattern and one
had to have friends, so why not Viola and Bertie ? It
hadn't been more important than that till now.

Had this been going on for months ? Did e^'eryone
know ? What an unutterable fool she must look.

A girl came in, switched off the drier and swung it
back. She pressed the palm of her hand to Ida's head.
" You're done," she said brightly. " MadamoiseUe will
be along to wind you."

Ida's hair stood out in a bush, brittle and cantankerous.
MadamoiseUe Paulette divided it and wound it strand by
strand on the curlers, tight against the head, and forced
under each, a circle of insulating felt. She prattled as
she worked and her small lively eyes were bright with
what may have been the accumulated triumph of seeing
other women perpetually at a disadvantage.

Ida's head grew heavy with metal, the curlers strained
painfully at the tender skin of her temples, lolling over
her forehead and beating, if she moved, against her ears.
She found MadamoiseUe Paulette and her chatter intoler-
able. Why on earth had she come here ? She never went
to one hairdresser for long, for she was perpetuaUy dis-
satisfied, and at present she hadn't one. This morning
when she had reaUsed that the first thing she must do
to clear the decks for whatever action she was going to
take, was to have her hair waved, her mind had turned
to this place that Viola had recommended so eagerly. At
bottom it was a morbid impulse that had brought her
here. " A hair of the dog," she thought sardonically.
She was sorry. It was a vile place. She loathed it.

" You are winding them too tightiy," she said irritably,
,' it's hurting me much more than usual."

BEAUTY IS STRENGTH 33

" You must suffer to be beautiful," replied Madamois-
elle gaily and began to apply the soaked sachets.

Ida shut her eyes. Now Madamoiselle was connecting
the curlers to the machine above her head. This was the
worst part, the weight, the pulling, the heat, the suffo-
cating smell of the sachets. Her thoughts kept pushing
their way through the thicket of her discomfort.

What was she going to do ? And what would Ced do ?
No man was ever safe from making a fool of himself.
She could have taken a sophisticated view of the whole
thing if he'd picked up a little dancer, but this was differ-
ent, a woman in their own circle, one of her friends. She
tried to move her head and was jerked into acute con-
sciousness of her situation.

" Please, Madam, please," insisted Madamoiselle.

" It's burning."

" No, no."

" Yes, there." She wanted to scream.

Madamoiselle released two curls and fitted two more.
" I'll sue her if she burns my hair," Ida thought.

She stared at her grotesque image. There was a bright
red spot on either cheek. Her spirits plunged even lower.
She thought of Ced, her mind groping towards him, for
the first time in years, thought what he had given her.
She'd never imagined that he would let her down. When
they were first married she remembered that he had had
all sorts of romantic ideas but she believed that she had
cured them. They hadn't ever quarrelled, not ever.
Sometimes he irritated her when she felt that he was
begging her for something she didn't know how to give,
didn't possess. But she always bit her annoj'ance down.

She didn't for a minute believe that Ced had started
this. But that didn't help. What she was going to do ?
What if it were serious and he wanted her to divorce

34 THE PERSIMMON TREE

him ? Her mind widened in horror. That would take
everything from her. her home, her biuii^round. her
position. A woman could only divorce successfully if
there was another man waiting for her. She would have
to make a new life. She was too tired. TOO OLD.

Like a little spark the idea began. She might forgive
him — ^the hagrdest way. without saying so. Just take no
notice. If she said nothing, did nothing, they couldn't
dislodge her, could they ? If anyone knew that she knew.
she would have to make a fuss and when she had made a
fuss Ced "would be driven to some sort of action. If she
did nothing and let the thing wear itself out. then she
could keep everjrtihing or nearly everything. She had
reached her bedrock. Her dark circled eyes looked back
at her and she saw defeat in them.

The red eye of the waving machine glared down.

" We'll soon be finished," sang Madamoiselle.

Now the machine was switched off and the curls undone
one by one, relieving the pressure. Her head was covered
with small oily corkscrew curls.

" Divine." crooned Madamoiselle.

Competent hands shampooed her again and she felt
as if the energetic fingers must break through her tired
thin skull as if it were matchboard. Whilst she waited
for Madamoiselle to set her, a girl brought her a cup of
tea. They were tender with her after the ordeal. She
drank it gratefully and fdt a little better. The sight of
Madamoiselle's deft fingars setting the waves reassure^
her too. She did know her job and the wave wasn't
going to be a failure as she had feared. Already with the
hair fitted in a wet casque to her head she looked more
like herself. Half an hour in the drier and she wouli^
be finished.

BEAUTY IS STRENGTH 35

Yes, but what was she going to do. It had seemed
settled a moment ago and she had determined to sacrifice
herself. Now she was undecided again. If Bertie wasn't
such a simp she could go to him and let him tackle the
situation. The idea attracted her but she dismissed it.
Bertie would just make a mess of it. How could Ced be
so foolish ? She was pleased to find that she felt angry
again — ^more angry and less defeated.

Viola wouldn't want a divorce, there were her children.
Ced wouldn't want one either. Scandal would get him
coming and going. They were, she supposed, just banking
on her being a fool, and they didn't even trouble to take
proper precautions against her finding out. That idea
smouldered. The situation took on hard, new lines.

They released her from the drier. To the touch the
hair seemed solid and caked, clogged as it was with
fixative, but when Madamoiselle had combed and patted
it, rewound the curls about her finger and burnished it
witli brilliantine, it looked soft and alive.

" Charming, " cooed Madamoiselle passing her the hand
mirror. For a moment Ida forgot her troubles. It was a
beautiful wave, her head had ne\er looked better. There
wasn't a grey hair.

As soon as she was unswathed from the gingham cape,
she began to maJce up her face, rediscovering all its lost
virtues. She did it slowly, waving away the apprentice
who obviously \\aiited to sweep up the fitter on the floor.
With deUcate, skilled fingers she rubbed cream into her
dried skin. She'd be a fool if she worried herself into
wrinkles. The trouble would pass but the wrinkles would
stay. She pencilled her brows and her whole face came
into clearer definition. As she rouged her hps, she smiled.
She wasn't so bad after all. There was plenty of fight in

36 THE PERSIMMON TREE

her still — and Ced wasn't going to get away with it. She,
not he, Wcis in the strong position. If he wanted to be a
fool he'd have to pay for it. She'd punish him and then —
she bent forward and looked into her own eyes, bright
once more under the influence of eye shadow and mascara
— and then she would win him back again. While she
had her looks she could do anything. She had been
through an ordeal but now she felt secure again. She
wasn't even very angry. She had put on again the whole
armour of sophistication. If anyone was going to look
fooUsh it wa^ Ced and Viola — especially Viola !

CANARIES SOMETIMES ADVERTISE 37

CANARIES SOMETIMES ADVERTISE

Spring was in the air.

The Managing Director, who prided himself on atten-
ding personally to every detail of the great store's organ-
ization, sent for the restaurant manager.

" I suppose," he said in a grudging voice, " that we'll
have to redecorate the restaurant. Our public expects
it."

The manager looked modestly down and murmered
that we always did at this time of the year, didn't we ?

" Well," said the Director, " you'd Ijetter go ahead.
Something original, something striking, something — er — ■"

"Smart?" suggested the manager.

The Director frowned. " Not smart. It isn't going to
be smart to be smart this season. No, no, something
charming, a soup^on of sentiment," and he made a butter-
fly gesture, exotic in so stout a man, " perhaps rather
amusing in an innocent way, but go easy on the sex
appeal. You might even make it painlessly informative.
Something that will please the ladies and advertise well.
Take a turn round the show rooms and look at the new
spring millinery."

The manager's dubious expression didn't come out of an
American business manual, and it irritated the Director.
" Jump to it, man, jump to it," and he added brusquely,
" I've given you bushels of ideas. Keep the costs down
and don't .bother me any further."

The interview was over and the manager withdrew,'
his features composed as nearly as possible into the-
expression of a creative artist in the throes.

The great store kept faith with its public, punctually
a week after the interview the restuarant was trans-

38 THE PERSIMMON TREE

formed, practically overnight, from a Tudor Farm Kitchen
into a Woodland Bower, and all well-to-do citizens were
invited to eat Under the Greenwood Tree. Every column
became a tree with spreading three-ply foUage and giant
magnoha blooms; quaint animals from the toy depart-
ment clung to the trunks and peered from the branches ;
from every tree hung a bright brass cage containing a
very yellow hve canary ; the pay desks were transformed
into dove cotes ; facsimile autumn leaves lay on the pale
green cloths artlessly advertising bargains in the shoe
department ; on each menu was the picture of a feathered
songster with a short description of his habits written
by an ornithologist. The waitresses wore dimdals of
primrose yellow and green. It was everything the direc-
torate could ask^^harming, romantic, amusing, infor-
mative, and novel.

The restaurant began to fill in earnest at twelve o'clock.
The ground swell of noise that takes possession of any
large restaurant at the peak hours had begun to gather —
footsteps, the scraping of chairs on parquet floors, many
conversations running together into one long mimnur, the
fainter, clearer converse of china, glass and silver. On it like
flotsam floated the occasional cough or laugh, or, more
rarely, a child's crying. The tables were filling, vari-
coloured parterres under the trees. The waitresses were
unconsciously working faster and faster, keying up to
the daily rush, the nerve racking business of speed with-
out hurry or disturbance. There was continual kaleido-
scopic movement. Clearing the murmurous noise by two
or three feet, the bird cages trembled a httle in the warm,
gently moving air, and their occupants hopped restlessly
from perch to perch. Occasionally, one twittered or
essayed a few bars of song. Above them were the preter-
naturally stUl foliage, and the chandehers glowing like

CANARIES SOMETIMES ADVERTISE 39

mutiple siins. E\'er\-thing was strange to them except
the bars of their cages.

One of the birds, the plumpest, yellowest, most lively
of all the little cocks, had already had a couple of adven-
tures. He had flipped a sunflower seed into an importcint
cup of coffee, \\ith the result that the owner had com-
plained to the management, and he had so taken the
fancy of an old lady, used to behaving naturally under
all circumstances, that she had insisted on her grand-
daughter mounting a chair to feed him. He had not
taken any notice of the tomato sandwich that the em-
barrassed girl pushed through his bars, but he seemed
verj' ahve to ever\"thing else about him. He hopped
from the perch to the floor of his cage, put his head on
one side, looked one way then the other, and hopped
back on to the perch. You would swear that he missed
nothing that went on at the four tables within his
immediate \ision. His interest was pert and gay.

Three of the tables were occupied, the fourth was
reserved for the Managing Director who intended this
day to take pot luck with the pubhc, a tribute to the
occasion. A waitress stood guard over it. "I'm sorry,
madam, this table is reserved." The raw seam of the new
uniform chafed the back of her neck, its colour tinted her
rosy skin with an unbecoming mauve. " There are two
good seats at the next table, sir. This table is reserved."
She hoped that no one was going to be disagreable about
the table ; people often were, and the customer was
always right. So were the manager and the assistant
manageress and the superintendents. That left no one
to be in the wTong except the girls. And now they had
been dressed to match the canaries. What next ? It
could have been worse. They might have gone aU Poljnie-
sian and put them into grass skirts. An5rway, the canaries

40 THE PERSIMMON TREE

were a change. She'd rather look at them than at people
stuffing themselves. Poor Uttle blighters, shut up in
cages. I'll say they're quaint. Hopping round as fresh
as paint taking everything in. But they'll get sick of it.
What was that song — " She married the old man for his
mone}' and now she's a bird in a gilded cage "? Could
do with a cage like that. It would be the great open
spaces compared to earning your Uving as a waitress.
Hope the O S's aren't going to make a set at this table.
They're just the sort to remember the advt. " Free for
all, no reservations."

The two large ladies and the thin httle girl with the
plaits moved in at the next table. They had large figures
under iron control, large, thickly powdered faces, large
jewellery, large handbags. They were alike because they
thought about the same things and in the same way.
But one had a stronger will which enabled her to do
most of the talking.

" No, I haven't seen Mrs. Merton-Small for months.
They lost their money. I told you, didn't I ? Yes, her
husband never said a word. The first thing she knew a
man came and cut off the telephone. She was as good as
out of things then. I said, just as you might say, or any
one else, 'Don't worry about the telephone, Mrs. Merton-
SmaU, I've got one and you're welcome to come and use
it just whenever you want to.' And. my dear, she did.
She was always coming, even when Oscar was at home
or when we were at dinner. Always in and out to that
telephone, not to see us mind you, just to make a con-
venience of us." She deflected the stream for a moment.
" Do you see the canaries, Margaret ? Aren't they
sweet ?"

" Yes, Auntie."

" I thought you'd like it here. It's fim, isn't it ?"

CANARIES SOMETIMES ADVERTISE 41

" Yes, Auntie."

" There's nothing like it at home, is there ?"

" No, Auntie."

The little girl wished Auntie hadn't mentioned home.
Once when she had been tiny she had been lost for hcdf
axL hour in an amusement park, and though the details
had long ago passed into a confused and hazy nightmare,
the terror and strangeness of it was still lying just under
the surface of her mind. It was much worse to be lost in
an amusement park than anywhere else. It wasn't real,
and because it wasn't real, anything at all might happen.
She was always getting glimpses of it in tiny, terrifying
peeps. This place was like it. And she felt lost all the time
since. . . ' That's a canary, it's a sweet bird,' she
said to herself. " I wish I had a canary."

" She had the most aggravating way of ringing up, if
you know what I mean. Some people can make the
simplest things aggravating, can't they ? She'd always
begin by apologising for bothering us and I'd think 'If
you know it's a nuisance, why do you do it ?' She'd
never say who she wanted to telephone or anything like
that, and she'd mutter into the telephone as if she thought
we were spies. Oscar used to make a noise on purpose.
He said I was too good natured. Perhaps I am. Anyhow,
it dawned on Mrs. Metron-Small at last and she asked
me did Oscar mind. What could I say ? I could only
leave it to her good feeling. She got very red and said
'I always leave the twopence.' I really was angry then,
Ella. Apparently she thought that because she paid
twopence it wasn't a favour. She could just march in
and out as if it were a telephone booth. Perhaps I
shouldn't have said what I did. She didn't come again
and now they have moved away. Eat your luncheon.

42 THE PERSIMMON TREE

Margaret. What is the matter with you ? You are not
going to cry, are you ?"

" No, Auntie." Though her mouth was still and her
eyes dry, her face had the knobby and transparent look
that goes before tears, and her aunt recognised it.

" Now, Margaret, be sensible. I came here solely for
yoTlr sake, to give you a treat. Don't brood, look about
you and enjoy yourself like a good girl."

The child gulped. A lump seemed to be forcing its
way not through her throat but through her mind. The
lump was always there, it didn't get smaller. If only she
could cry it away. She pushed some food into her mouth.

" No, I'm not hard on her, Ella. It's terrible for a
child to lose her mother, I know. But it's a month since
it happened, and Margaret must puU herself together.
She's not a baby, she's ten. It's no kindness to be soft
with her. Fretting seems to have become a positive habit
with her now. I really can't understand it, because Mary

was just the gayest creature and you'd think her child

Eat it up Margaret, there's a good child. Oscar said to
me 'If people can't keep up it's just too bad, but you
can't do anything about it. If they got ahead they
wouldn't wait for you.' "

(The cutlet was made of wood. Auntie was made of
wood like Mrs. Noah. She popped out at you. She wasn't
real. Quick, quick, think of canaries.)

On the first Monday of every month they always had
lunch together, the old man, very rich, stone deaf, his
daughter, her husband and their little boy. In years the
son-in-law hadn't got over the idea that he ought, by
hook or by crook, to make conversation. The daughter
knew that it wasn't necessary. She smiled and patted
her father's arm. If the food was good she knew that he

CANARIES SOMETIMES ADVERTISE 43

would be quite happy and satisfied just seeing them there.
These occasions did not ruffle the junket smoothness of
her mind. The little boy really enjoyed them. He liked
seeing his grandfather eat. He recognised a maestro in
the old gourmet, and although he was not a greedy child,
he felt a deep satisfaction in this form of realism.

" How do you like the new decoration ?" the son-in-law
began.

" How do you like the new decoration ?" the son-in-law
began.

"Eh?"

" Decoration. How do you like it ?"

"What's that?"

" Birds."

"Eh?"

" Birds."

" Oh, yes. Good suggestion. Spring chicken stuffed
with truffles. Do you, young-fellow-me-lad ?"

The little boy nodded vigorously.

' ' Canaries, ' ' said the son-in-law in a semi-shout, pointing.

" Those. We'll have to pay for them but the food
won't taste any better. Romans used to eat nightingales."

The child laughed out loud and his- grandfather drew
down his eyebrows in a mock scowl. The boy wriggled,
laughing. The mother smiled. The taut and nervous
son-in-law was the odd man out.

' ' Order something for me. Anything you think I' d like. "
He chpose the most expensive, the most exotic dish on

the menu.

" Darling, I couldn't possibly eat that. You know I

never eat things like that." She ordered for herself,

competently, a pineapple salad. " You see you don't

understand me at all."

44 THE PERSIMMON TREE

He cursed himself for a clumsly brute. She smiled at
him faintly, sadly, under the shadow of her black hat,
big dark eyes in an exquisite pale face.

" Why did we come to this terrible, noisy place ?"

" You wanted to yesterday. You thought it would be
amusing."

" I only said that because I was afraid of you. I knew if
we went to a quiet place you'd start pestering me to be
engaged." She drew off her long black gloves — she knew
how to do it excitingly — and let her long, lanquid hands
lie on the tablecloth.

" It's rather nice now we're here. Don't you think the
canaries are jolly ? Look at that one !"

She shivered. " I don't like things in cages. All my
life I've been afraid of the cage."

" Rosalie darling, is that why you won't be engaged ?"

" Yes, perhaps it is. Partly."

" But it's silly, sweetheart. If you're willing to marry
me as soon as ever I can make you a home ,why won't
you be engaged ?"

" I won't have a reserved notice stuck on me. It may
be years before we can get married."

" I'd feel so much safer if you'd only wear a ring."

" I'd go mad feeling safe. I just couldn't bear it. I'm
willing to trust you without any rings, or announcements,
or anything."

" But, Rosalie sweet. . . ."

A middle aged lady and gentleman took the two vacant
seats at the table. You could see at a glance that they
were both fussy and devoted. The lovers exchanged
eloquent looks, and fell silent. They had been enjo5dng
themselves immensely.

The newcomers put their heads together over the menu.

" I really would like that," said the lady wistfully, her

CANARIES SOMETIMES ADVERTISE 45

finger hovering among the delectable viands, " but it
isn't in our diet, is it ?"

" No, my dear, but I think we might."

" Wouldn't it be rash ?"

" To-day is our anniversary."

" If you will, I will."
They smiled and sighed.

" What did I tell you ?" said Rosalie, looking wicked.
" I don't think, Don, that after all, I'll marry you at all."

It was five minutes to one, and the Managing Director
had arrived with an important business friend, a mild,
frail old gentleman, so shrewd that you never suspected
it till several months after it was too late to do anything
about it. The plump canary had an instant succes with
him. He was, as he diffidently confessed, a bird fancier
in his scanty leisure. The canary chirped, hopping like a
grace note from perch to perch.

"Sweet, sweet," said the old man. They might have been
birds of a feather, the canary the more worldly of the two.

The orchestra had taken its place on the dais. The
burr of mingled and aglutinative sound in the great
restaurant had reached its height, a swell of sound with
a flying spume of light clatter. Into it the music, loud
and compact, was launched like a ship. To the plump
canary it sounded a challenge. He lifted his head, his
throat swelled and he began to sing. The birds near him
were caught up in it, and presently all through the room
canaries were singing. They sang with all their might,
their hearts swelled to bursting, against the orchestra.
The volume mounted and mounted, eighty canaries
singing in a passion of competition.

All the human particles beneath the singing canopy
were swept together. The waitresses hurrying with their
loaded trays stood still, diners in the act of arriving or

46 THE PERSIMMON TREE

departing were immobilised as if the air had hardened
about them. Every head was raised. An elderly spinster
who had just come out of a nerve hospital tried to start
a revivalist meeting. The old business man closed his
eyes and his face moulded into the still, beatific smile of
the dead. The little girl, Margaret, suddenly pushed
away her Neopolitan ice, and, pillowing her head on her
arms, began to cry. The hard lump was melting and she
could cry grief out of her breast without let or hindrance.
The aunt took no notice. The little puce mouth in her
big face was open and slack with amazement. Was this
a stunt or had it just happened ? Don could feel Rosalie
trembling from head to foot with a fiine inner vibration.
Slowly she turned her face towards him. The old married
couple whose blood stream was purified by diet, held
hands unashamedly. The deaf man stopped eating and
stared about him in wonder. He certainly heard some-
thing, he wanted to know if it was the Communists.

The orchestra stopped playing, then one by one the
canaries stopped singing. People sighed as if they were
coming to from a faint, laughed foolishly, spoke loudly,
began to move, to eat, to hurry. The spell was broken
but on every mind, hke the moisture from a burst bubble,
there lingered a trace of mystery. It had lasted perhaps
three minutes.

The Managing Director sent for the manager of the
restaurant. He came wiping the sweat from his forehead,
the backs of his hands.

" What did you pay for those canaries ?"

" They are hired, sir."

" Send them back at once."

" Yes, sir."

" Once," said the Managing Director, relaxing a little,
" is a good advertisement, twice would be a scandal."

THE WOMAN WHO DID THE RIGHT THING 47

THE WOMAN WHO DID THE RIGHT
THING

It was strange how Barbara kept thinking that she
saw Murray Hart. There was a man in a grey suit now
walking with a girl on the path at the far side of the
lawn ; she had been sure, at the first glance, that it was
Murray. Her heart had leaped painfully and she had had
a queer, white feeling round her mouth. It was not
Murray, not even like him, very much younger, but
there was something in the way he turned to the girl
beside him, eager, taut, absorbed. ' . . . She was aware
of it even at this distance. This was like looking in a
mirror, Barbara told herself painfully, only in reverse.
It was like the image of a dream cast on her waiting
mind. She was obsessed by these pictures of a happiness
she knew to be impossible, out of her reach.

Barbara walked slowly, at the same pace as the two
across the lawn. They carried their own world with
them, she thought, they saw everything about them, if
they looked at all, with eyes different from her's, even
the sky and the trees were not the sky and trees that she
saw. A raw light poured down from the cloudy sky and
there was a malaise over the gardens. Trees and bushes
shrank before the wind, turning up the dulled or silvery
backs of their leaves ; the grass was already brownish
after an early ispell of hot weather ; in empty flower beds
the earth was dry and grey. There was no colour under
the pale sky. Barbara reflected that it might rain, that
she had no umbrella and that these were her best clothes.
Her hat would never be the same again if it got wet.
But these were small inconsequent thoughts that blew

48 THE PERSISLMON TREE

across her mind like the few, low, fleecy clouds o^ er the
close packed rain clouds in the upper skv.

It was natural that she should think of Murray to-day
for she was on her way to an afternoon party at Dora
Murchison's Macquarie St. flat, and it was there, nine
months ago, that she had met Murray for the first time.
She was walking through the Botanic Gardens to kill
time, she didn't want to be the first to arrive. She was
aiming at the comfortable anonymous, moment when the
room was half fuU, everybodj' taUdng. Parties were
always rather a plunge for her, she went to so few. But
she was determined now to accept any Ln\-itations that
came her way, to go on exactly as usual, just as if she
were dying, and determined to hide it. Actually she had
not seen Murray for a fortnight. They had said, smiling,
that they weren't going to be childish and avoid one
another, they'd still be friends, now and forever. Murray
wouldn't be at Dora's this afternoon, because it was
going to be a purely feminine partj-. But it was some-
thing to be returning to a place where she had met him,
for she half behe^■ed that she wovdd pick up some in-
finitesimal trace of him there, and take ghostly comfort
from it.

" I am like a young girl in love," she reproached her-
seK. " I have no right to this," she told herself bitterlj-
" I am old enough to know better." She weis swept
with nostalgia for youth when at least love was not
ridiculous, when one had a right to grief, even to a broken
heart. She told herself, driving in the statements hke
nails ; "I am nearly forty, I am a widow, everything is
over. Molly is my life. I have done the right thing for
Murray. That is all that matters.

This thought so assailed her that she stopped on the
path and stood staring at a great cactus plant, arrogant

THE WOMAN WHO DID THE RIGHT THING 49

and ugly, with grey green fleshy leaves and a long raking
florescence still in bud. She could no longer see the young
lovers, they had turned away into a side path, but she
did not miss theiti, her mind had entered its labyrinth.

Of one thing Barbara was sure, she knew Murray better
than anyone in the world knew him or ever had known
him. Better than. his wife, Phoebe. She had met Phoebe
Hart once, a handsome, competent woman, who looked
as if she knew how to get her own way. She had been
faintly, ridiculously surprised that, with that name, she
hadn't two or three double chins. Phoebe cared nothing
for Murray's music. To her it was a job like other jobs,
and she reproached him because he did not make more
money. It was she who kept him chained to teaching,
fraying his spirit, giving up to " giggling girls, without
a note of music in them," the time he wanted for study
and composition. Murray was vulnerable. The least thing
tormented him. She had seen his pain reflected in his
difficult, tortured music that no one understood. He had
turned to her so naturally for peace. Their's had been
such a gentle friendship. Murray, for all his great gifts,
was so much simpler than anyone thought ; for all his
high strung, restless temperament, so much gentler.

When Gordon died young, Barbara thought her life,
except for Molly, was ended too. Five quiet, eventless,
not unhappy years fell away, and then came Murray and
a slow, mysterious blooming had begun in her again.
The past was lost, there was only Murray. They drew
nearer and nearer to love in a sort of charmed silence
that was broken at last by Murray's eager, ardent
pleading. Then she had had to think for them both,
but most for Murray. She had had to look forward
and see where this was leading them. Murray, because
of his great gifts, his music, was the important

50 THE PERSIMMON TREE

one. She thought of Phoebe too, but only because of
what she could do to Murray. They had quarrelled once,
Murray had told her about it, not the cause, but the
quarrel itself, in veiled, broken, phrases, how she had
" known how to torture him," he had had to " climb
down," been " beaten " and Phoebe had made the most
of her advantage. Barbara had seen how the whole
affair had lacerated him and left him imable to work
for weeks. He had thrust this humihation on her with
a kind of proud perversity. She saw an infinity of pain
in the episode. Phoebe wouldn't spare him now, and his
fine drawn spirit couldn't stand it. There couldn't be
any secrecy. Murray was transparent. She understood
that. It was something to be reckoned with.

There would be a scandal, Phoebe would see to that.
He would lose the pupils he hated but needed, he would
be dragged down. It wasn't these external things that
really mattered, it was the damage they would do to
Murray. There was only one road to peace and safety
for him, and that was through his music. She couldn't
bring more trouble upon him, distract him further. He
thought he would find peace with her but she knew
better, she knew him so well. Only in cosmic things
could his great heart find shelter. So she told him that
they could only be friends, that they must stop growing
fond of one another while there was still time. . . And
he had, strangely and miraculously, beUeved the words
that were so thin and cold in her mouth. Perhaps he
was working now, and that was why she had not seen
or heard from him, perhaps she had given him something
to put into his music, something more than the fever and
bitterness that had gone into it before.

Suddenly it seemed to Barbara that she had been
walking in the Gardens for a very long time. She realised

J.

THE WOMAN WHO DID THE RIGHT THING 51

with something hke panic that she was already late for
her party. She almost turned back for the persistant wind
had chilled her inside her clothes, and her courage was
shrunken. But she knew that it was no good indulging
herself like that.

Dora Murchison's long room overlooking the Gardens
and the harbour beyond seemed crowded with women.
It was gay and shining and the still, warm, air smelt of
perfume, flowers and cocktails. Barbara felt like a dove
among parrakeets.

" Barbara darling, I began to be afraid you weren't
coming." Dora, with her arm about Barbara's waist, led
her among the guests. Affection wrapped her round. It
was as if she, coming late, was the honoured guest. She
had been to school with most of these women. They had
gone on from the fashionable and expensive school to
fashionable and expensive lives, and Barbara had
dropped out, only holding, in Dora's friendship, a single
thread of the old life. Now she made them all feel
young again. She was so exactly as they remembered
her. She reassured them. They loved her.

" How young Barbara looks," they sighed.

" That's because she leads a good life," said Dora,
and everyone laughed. It was impossible to think of
Barbara as being anything but good.

Every one talked, groups formed and broke, there was
laughter and the tinkle of glass. Dora brought Barbara
a cocktail. " This is called Angel's Milk," she said, and
laughed. Barbara let herself be carried, lightly and
gently, by the party. She had stopped thinking, and
the Angel's Milk warmed her. Again and again she had
to tell her little story. " My husband died five years ago."

52 THE PERSIMMON TREE

" Only Molly." " I don't go any where much." " I'd
love to come and see you." The person of whom she
spoke seemed quite unreal. Her attention was arrested
by a sudden reality.

Some one said : " Phoebe takes it too seriously. One
shouldn't. It always happens, dosen't it ?"

" Poor Phoebe, she has had a good deal to put up with,
one way and another. She has been waiting twenty years
for Murray to settle down."

" She is beginning to show the wear and tear. He can
stand the racket apparently, but she can't. For wear,
give me an artistic temperament, they're toughest."

" He is very charming."

" But difficult," some one added.

" That's what they like."

" Do you remember Murray Hart ? You met him here
before I went to England," Dora asked, drawing Bar-
bara into the group.

" She's only twenty and one of his pupils, brilhant, I
beheve. They go everj-nhere together."

" Well, really, I didn't think Murray would descend to
cradle snatching,"

" Don't begin pitying her. She can look after herself.
It's Murray who'll need the prayers of the congr^ation."
" Poor :^Iurray."

Every one laughed " Now you've given 3'oiu:self away,
Catherine. We always sxispected. ..."

" How long has it been going on ?"

" It has only just blown up apparently."

" \\Tien is Murray going to do something ? His music.

THE WOMAN WHO DID THE RIGHT THING 53

I mean. We've been expecting some magnum opus for
years."

" Never, I think. He's the kind that promises and
promises and goes through all the evolutions of a genius
and in the end never does anything."

" Poor Murray."

" But he's so attractive."

"And a dear really — when he isn't making love."

Barbara got away from the party, somehow. Dora ran
after her. " But you can't go like that, Babs. Besides,
it's raining."

Barbara waved forlornly but finally as the lift carried
her pale face out of sight. Dora returned slowly and
thoughtfully to her party.

The rain swirled down Macquarie Street, not heavy, but
thick and feathery on the wind. Barbara was glad it
was raining. She wanted to walk and walk. She turned
to the right again into the Gardens. A deUcate lustre of
colour had come back to them. The trees were dark
and bloomed with rain till they looked like trees in a
Corot canvas. Seeing it, Barbara thought inconsequently.
" Corot was in love with trees." The wet grass was more
green than brown, the upturned earth dark with mois-
ture. There was a good grateful smell of wet earth on
the air.

Barbara followed one path after another, walking with
short quick steps while her thoughts raced down their
own dark channels and a slow black tide of bitter regret
and disappointment welled up in her heart. ' ' For nothing,
for nothing," she said over and over again to herself.
Now something had crumbled in her. She wanted love,

54 THE PERSIMMON TREE

not Murray, only love. She had thrown it away for
nothing.

She saw, or thought she saw, the man in grey and the
girl in blue, standing together very close and still under
a tree with thick foliage, tented in by the rain. Perhaps
she did not see them. It may have been an illusion, but
an agony of rebeUion shook her and tears began to mingle
with the rain on her cheeks.

" My hat is ruined," She thought. " and I don't care."
She could not imagine that she would ever want a hat
again, or buy one or do any of the small commonplace,
cheerful things of which her life had been made up.

IT WILL GROW ANYWHERE 55

IT WILL GROW ANYWHERE

The orchestra behind the potted palms played a valse
de concert with passionless verve. They always began
with it. It tightened the tension like a pair of pliers. No
one listened, but the clamant music, with its clipped
sensuality, affected them nevertheless, stirred inchoate
images, mixed, with their blood, and reflected itself again
in the stubbed melodrama of raised voices, broken
laughter and parade. It was one more roof upon their
close, bright, ephemeral world. After the valse de con-
cert there would be a pause, then a tango, a pause, a
rhumba. . . The pauses were hollow and dramatic,
filled with chatter and edged laughter.

The The Dansant at the Golf House — the limited
liability company that looked like a club — was an in-
stitution. The people were always the same or looked
the same. They all knew one another. They were all
agreed, for a couple of hours, to accept the same mirage.
Here the illusion lived, buoyed up like a balloon on the
warm air, that every woman was beautiful and charming,
and every man had a substantial bank balance — or at
least a large overdraft. There was nothing here to prick
it, from the fraternal manager-secretary to the great fan
oif blue-powdered lihes in the mock-baronial fireplace.
It was the tribal cave.

There were men in plus fours, and girls in tweeds and
bright pullovers — marigold, scarlet, emerald — straight
from the links ; women in eye veils and silver fox capes
who had driven over in their coupes ; a few very young
girls still too inexpert to hide their innocent, awkward
grace ; a scattering of avuncular men, the necessary

56 THE PERSIMMON TREE

padding. There was a scent of cigarettes and beeswax
and coffee with an inner lining of something faintly
astringent, like crushed green grass. The women passed
in little puffs of warm purfume, of furs and powder.
There was food, so much reduced and stylised as to be
more a ritual than a nourishment or even a pleasure —
acrid black coffee served with a bowl of airy whipped
cream a la Floriani, pale scones leaking bright butter on
the paper d'oyleys, over-dainty sandwiches drifted over
with strands of limp lettuce like the conscientious hairs
on a balding hea,d, tiny cakes, varnished and mathe-
niatical, that only the adolescent were ever seen to eat.
There was music. There was dancing that was like, not
dancing itself but, in its more cogent moments, the short-
hand symbols of dancing.

They sat at a table that was a little withdrawn by
reason of being in a bay window. Behind them was the
semicircle of glass and the view, over the shining beetle
backs of parked cars, to the sea.

One .was lean, middle aged, with worn temples. A
man not given to questioning the world about him and
never, perhaps, challenged by it, his courtesy as ingrained
as his income, neither stupid nor insensitive. A solicitor
in a sedate line of business. He had his own place, which
was not avuncular, and knew everyone. His companion
soon would. In the perfect mask of convential prosperity
were set the bright, inquisitive eyes of a pug. His sup-
pressed vivacity and robust omnivorousness acted as a
peculiar stimulus to the other.

" Which is Mrs. Curtice ?"

" The plump little blonde with her back to the light.
In mushroom pink. The second Mrs. Curtice."

" I suppose she's one of the people I'll meet ?"

IT \\ILL GROW ANYWHERE 67

" Yes, you'll meet Violet everywhere. That's Curtice
with the red neck and sandy hair."

" Oh, I've known him for years, on and off. Used to
box with him when we were youngsters. He was a bit
of an athlete then, plenty of go, but nowhere special to
go to. Popular sort of chap ?"

" Well hked. Everyone knows where they are with
Ralph."

" And where's that ?"

" Nowhere in particular."

" He gets there just the same, I suppose, and no one
knows why. I've watched him from a distance putting
on the whole armour of success — golf, rotary, avoirdu-
pois. Didn't know he'd married twice, though. How do
these chaps do it ? No looks, no brains, not enough
money to account for everything. You and I haven't
managed to get one between us."

" In these parts no bachelor is ever despaired of.
Ralph's a pretty warm man now."

" The present lady looks well entrenched."

" She is. Everyone has forgotten Struan, especially
Violet. She went out like a match six years ago."

" Death or divorce ?"

" Divorce."

" What was their trouble, or was it the same old
thing ?"

" It was the same old thing, but there were compH-
cations. You see Struan was the perfect wife."

" Some of them do try that. It's always fatal."

" Struan didn't try. She was the perfect wife."

" How perfect ?"

•■ Perfect."

58 THE PERSIMMON TREE

" You mean, she ran his home Hke a clockwork palace?

" She did, but there was a lot more than that. You
see, she understood him."

" Once a woman understands a man, the poor devil
hasn't a rag of privacy left."

" It wasn't hke that at all."

" Sorry, old man. She got a raw deal, didn't she ?"

" It should have worked out, but it didn't. Ralph —
she called him Rafe — had a roving eye. It began to
rove before they had been married a year. Struan didn't do
a thing about it. After a while Ralph didn't even pay her
the comphment of being careful. One evening I remember
he was being a bit obvious. It was the first time, too,
that I realised that Struan was different from the rest of
them. I just thought of her as a girl who was getting
hurt, and had it in my mind I'd like to knock the fellow
down. Just as anyone might feel."

" Of course."

" Struan must have seen it in my eyes. She didn't
say, as another girl might ha\"e, 'It isn't important,'
only 'It's part of Rafe, 5'ou know. I cant pick and
choose.' No cracking hardy. Just that. She had a rather
shattering honesty towards herself as well as towards
others. I think it might have been one of her difficulties."

" No doubt. That attitude works \Wth a husband nine
times out of ten — ^but not the tenth."

" Yes, ^'iolet was the tenth."

" \^'as she dumb with love and all that ?"

" I don t know. I made a bad break once, after everv-
thing had blown up. I asked her if she still cared for
Ralph. She gave me a startled look, and didn't answer."

" How long did it last ?"

IT WILL GROW ANYWHERE 59

" Five years, and I don't think anyone expected it to
break up. Curtice was in clover. Struan had money of
her own. I know she used to pay for her own clothes,
never nagged him for anything. She gave him a back-
ground. The sort of thing other women tried to do
with their houses and their parties, and couldn't."

" Did the other women like her ?"

" I don't think she was really popular, though they
gushed over her a lot. I can't understand why. I never
heard her say a spiteful thing about another woman.
She was generous to a fault, and utterly loyal to Ralph."

" How did he stand up to all that perfection ?"

" I can't say he ever showed to much advantage."

" U-u-m."

" One takes sides. It's very foolish, of course, and the
last thing Struan wanted. She couldn't bear anyone to
sympathise, even when there was something obvious to
sympathise with. She tried to have a baby, but some-
thing went wrong. Struan was so brave about it, Ralph
didn't get a chance. I imagine she apologised for her
incompetence. Felt she'd failed him, anyhow. After that
she hardened up a bit. She used to talk the patter of the
moment, very bright and amusing, but I never got the
impression that she was happy."

" Then the tenth woman came on the scene ?"

" Yes, Violet. I don't suppose Ralph was any more
serious than he had been all the other times. He always
had himself bluffed at first. But Violet was. She kept
house for her father who was retired. Rather nonde-
script people. Nobody called, I fancy, or took any notice
of them. You know how cliquey people are here. If you
don't measure up you might as well be ten years dead.
Damned cruel, of course, I didn't think of it at the time,
but knowing Violet now, I can pretty well imagine what

60 THE PERSIMIVION TREE

she felt then. She had social ambitions, wanted to escape
out of her dreary Uttle home, wanted to marry. It was
a life and death matter. They probably came here to
better her chances and no one noticed her existance.
You can imagine what she was like six years ago, two
stone lighter, not so guilefully babyish, and as ready to
fight as any cornered animal. I don't know how Ralph
met her, a pick-up at one remove probably. Anyhow,
she struck a spark in him, the usual spark, and blew on
it for all she was worth."

" They're alike. Don't you see it ? Soul mates, I
shouldn't wonder. Damn funny."

" She put pressiu^e on Ralph, till he asked Struan to
release him. Struan went to see \lolet, sure, bless her
poor innocent heart, that a httle straightforwardness
between them would clear it up. It didn't. They say
that when Struan caught sight of them both in a murky
mirror in Violet's shabby httle drawing room she ex-
claimed in her high clear voice : 'My dear, how absurd.
You look like the wife and I look like the other woman,
don't I ?' Violet treated her to a flood of Woolloomooloo.
I can believe it of her but not before witnesses. Struan
retreated. Honesty and sanity and humour were worse
than useless, and she hadn't any other weapons. You
see how innocent she was at heart ? She'd always had
confidence in these things. Violet was implacable. She
hated Struan far more than she loved Ralph, and Struan
was no match for her. She offered to divorce Ralph, but
Violet pointed out that she had no grounds. Violet was
careful enough to keep her own position in^nolable, and
his previous rovings had been condoned. The danger of
manufactured evidence and the slur she felt it would cast
on her romance, as, with a tough woman's sentimentcdity,
she called it, set \iolet against any such plan. Struan

IT WILL GROW ANYWHERE 61

offered to let Ralph divorce her for desertion. That takes
three years aiid Violet knew well enough that three years
would beat her if she had only beauty's hair to hold
Ralph with. Of course Struan was in an impregnable
position, she had only to do what she had done so often
before, nothing. But she agreed to let him divorce her.
The thing was so ugly, so amazing to her, that she had
no will to fight. She came to me about it."

" Did you fix it up for her ?"

"No, I gave her some good advice and sent her away."

" Weren't you a bit of a fool ? I beg your pardon. It
was your opportunity, wasn't it ? I mean, you might
have done everything to spare her, when another man,-
the kind that usually takes these cases, would just shove
things along anyhow."

" It would have been against my conscience, legal as
well as personal."

" It went through, I suppose ?"

" Yes."

" How did the other women take it ?"

" They said 'Aren't men beasts ?' but they didn't go
near Struan."

" I gather that the first Mrs. Curtice was very good
looking ?"

" Struan would have been lovely if she hadn't been so
damned fashionable. She wasn't satisfied unless every-
thing looked as if it had been bought. That's all part of
it, you know. She took things too seriously. All the
shibboleths. She really believed in them. She thought a
marriage 'could be made successful by observing all the
rules. She was a civilized woman and that means she'd
let go, slipped out of, that secret barbarian life that
women lead. They knew it. She was an outcast. She
had nothing to fall back on. When she failed, her whole

62 THE PERSIMMON TREE

scheme of things fell to pieces. It wasn't Ralph, it was
the failure that broke her down."

" Couldn't she be happy with the right man ? Someone
who understood her ?"

" Yes, if she would only let herself be. Someone who
realised how sensative and innocent she is under it
all. But the trouble is she can't get over it. She blames
herself."

" You still see her then ?"

" Oh, yes, she comes into my office every now and then,
looking as if she had everything under control. 'I suppose
you couldn't take me to lunch,' she says, fastening her
glove with an elegant, studied gesture like something
learned from a book or a film. So vulnerable."

" So you take her to lunch ?"

" Yes, and we go over the whole affair. It does her
good, I think. ReUeves her. But the trouble is, that
having given me her confidence is a good reason for not
seeing me again for months. She's so vunerable, so
sensitive, so gallant."

The inquisitive man felt uncomfortable. He didn't
want to look at his companion. Some men went out
and got drunk, some talked. Why me ? he thought.
He'd been made a victim, a convenience. He was irritated.
This wasn't tragic, it was comic. It wasn't even comic,
it was futile.

Dusk clung like gauze to the sea and the waves left
arabesques of shining foam on the empty beach. The
grey-green hills of the deserted golf course rose and fell
as gentle as breathing. The casuarinas traced their
ancient pattern against the faint green twilight sky. The
golf house, like a ship from an unknown barbarous port,
lay stranded and blazing on the serenity of the night.

THE WRONG HAT .63

THE WRONG HAT

It looked a very expensive place, but Gwenda had said
to come here. She wasn't even to think of money because
they were giving her the hat, and they wanted it to be
just exactly what she liked. This was the first time that
she had been able to buy any hat that took her fancy
without so much as looking at the price ticket. She was
going to do the thing properly, she owed it to the children.
It was more than a hat, Peter said, it was the Great
Come Back.

This was a beautiful room, large, high-ceUinged and
serene — the sort of room calculated to serve as a pre-
fect background for smart women. It was a pleasure just
to sit here high above the crowded streets, the sales, the
bargains, the Friday specials, in perfect tranquility. It
was at once so sedate and so reckless. She knew how
utterly rash and vulnerable that pearl grey super carpet,
fitted right up to the walls, was. Everything was silvery,
oyster coloured walls, grey woodwork, limpid mirrors,
grey velvet curtains framing, like two great pictures, the
view across the park and St. Mary's Cathedral to the
tumbled insurgent sky line of King's Cross and, to the
left, a blue bay of the harbour.

Only half a dozen hats were in sight, poised on stands
like young masts, elegent, immaculate, nonchalant. One
of them in shiny black straw with a tiny crown and a big
tilt was, she thought, the gayest, smartest hat that she
had ever'seen. No doubt it was what the social columns
always referred to as an amusing hat. But when she had,
very tentatively, indicated it the girl who was looking
after her had smiled and shaken her head. " That's not
quite Madam's style."

64 THE PERSIMMON TREE

Such a nice girl, as friendly and helpful, despite the
sophistication of her rosy nails and sculptured curls, as
Gwenda would be. Not a bit like a shop girl anxious to
sell, only anxious to please. This was, had she known it
the final flower of the professional amateur. She had
gone to the workroom now to bring a charming little
model that had only jtist been created and never before
shown.

The only blot in the room was her old hat. The children
had been quite right. " Darling," Gwenda said, " You're
not old. I'm going to make j'ou have nice things now
we can afford them." And Peter, roughly tender in the
way that always flattered her so, had said " Snap out of
it, my girL We aren't going to let you settle down into
a professional widow. If you only knew it, that hat you
are wearing is nothing but a funk hole." She could see
it now for what it w^as, the dowdy hat of a dingy woman.
But she didn't have to be dingy. It was just a sort of
habit that had crept on her. After the shock and misery
of Jim's death she hadn't cared what she wore, so long
as it was something plain and dark and cheap. Having
gone into mourning she hadn't had the heart to come out
of it, not even in six years. Now the children had taken
a hand and announced a second spring. She realised that
they were right.

She looked at herself critically in the mirror. She had
to admit that she looked quite . . . pleasant. Grey
hair and a few wTinkles, of course, but not so bad. The
light was kind. Here she realised what good things life
offered and she felt that she had had a narrow escape
from throwing them away prematurely. Her heart was
light.

Her eyes wandered lovingly to the smart little tilted
hat. \Vh\- wasn't it her style ? She felt in her bones

THE WRONG HAT 65

that it was the very hat. There wouldn't be any harm
in trying it on whilst the girl was away. She picked it
up, it was as light as a feather and beautifully finished,
probably came from Paris or New York and cost a pretty
penny. You couldn't say it was too bright or juvenile.

Carefully, she pressed the front of the brim against her
forehead and fitted the ribbon bandeau over the back of
her head as she had seen the assistant do. Unconsciously
she imitated her almost caressing gesture. She looked in
the mirror. Horrified, she peered closer. A pain, sharper
than she had known for years, twisted her heart, a des-
pair more sudden and complete than she had believed
possible, engulfed her. The hat was jaunty and young,
but the face beneath it was old and tired. The hat jeered.
It threw into pitiless rehef every wrinkle and blemish.
It marked the collision of two worlds.

With trembling hands she took the hat off and returned
it to its stand. An assistant and another customer were
at the other end of the room, their backs turned. No
one had seen. She sat down again, staring blankly before
her. She had seen the image of her own death, and in this
one moment it struck more closely home than anything
that had ever happened to her. This had happened to
her, to no one else. The children would never under-
stand. They would try to laugh her out of it. She couldn't
tell them. Oh, but she had seen it, seen it. The six years
of her widowhood had been quiet and safe. She hadn't
challenged time.

The girl stood beside her holding the new model, but
haggard eyes met the smihng ones in the glass. Slowly
she shook her head as the tears welled.

" No, my dear," she said, " I can't try it on. . . . It's
too late," and she groped blindly for her old hat, her
faithful friend.

66 THE PERSIMMON TREE

TINKLING CYMBALS

CONVERSATION IN A BUFFET

It was the peak hour in the buffet. A ceaseless clang
rose to the serene grey satin-wood ceiling from the long
counters and the little pens along the wall. This buffet
was one of those barnacles that cling to the outer edges
of the gay world. It would have been a rather curious
place if it were not so commonplace. It was made up
of odds and ends from all over the world. The wooden
pens had obviously evolved from high pews in old
churches ; the chromium plating, the shining compact
orderliness beneath the hubbub was of the hospitals ; the
long counters were recently reminiscent of the bar ; the
decor was that of the cinema, and harmlessly American.
The waitresses were cheeky but pretty, and the clientele,
consuming three-decker sandwiches, waffle steaks,
omelets and draught beer in globular tankards, were
the sons and daughters, secretaries and lady friends
(taking the day off) of the older people dining more
solemnly and expensively in the great hotel over their
heads.

At this time, one o'clock on a Saturday, everything
was submerged in noise, the genial clatter of one big
party. The stout young man in the grey suit took no
notice. He was very used to eating in such places. He
was eating oysters now, lifting them tenderly one by one
out of their shells, laving them in the sauce Momay,
and conveying them to his mouth. ... He was pre-
occupied but he was too naturally thrifty, to carefully
aware of values, not to pay proper attention to his

CONVERSATION IN A BUFFET 67

oysters. He didn't intend to waste them on himself.
But to the waitress's efforts at conversation he remained
impervious. He did not think that it would be becoming
in him to-day. The seat beside him, on which rested
his new grey hat, remained miraculously vacant until a
voice said :

" Why didn't you tell me you owned the place, you
old ruffian ?"

" 'lo Jimmy," he said, removing the headpiece resignedly.

Jimmy tucked his long legs under the counter and
stowed his hat in one of the slots provided. He observed
the oysters.

" You're doing yourself proud."

" Yes."

" Celebrating something ?"

" Not exactly." ,

" You're a close one, Bobby."

Bobby smiled complacently at the compliment. The
waitress brought him roast beef accompanied by
vegetables-in-season in a bird bath.

" I'm getting up my strength."

" Well, well. I think I'll have a three-decker, they
mayn't be strengthening, but they are filling."

" I'm going to propose to a girl," said Bobby, with
his mouth full.

" What ?"

" Marriage."

" Bully for you. Who's the girl ?"

" Elsa."-

" Elsa ? I thought of asking her myself once."

" What happened ?"

" Nothing. I didn't ask her."

" Did you ever ask a girl ?" Jimmy was not above
learning.

68 THE PERSIMMON TREE

" Not when I was sober."

" Pity. It's a great feeling, you know."

" Do you think she'll have you ?"

" Just between you and me she's been keen on me for
a long time."

" You're a clam. I didn't even know you were going
round together."

" We haven't been. I've only just figured it out. You
know me, Jimmy. When I make up my mind it stays
put." He gave an unconscious imitation of Mussolini
and speared another potato. " I'm dead serious," he
said.

" I'm sure you are, old man."

" She hasn't just bowled me over, I've worked it all
out. The man who isn't married is at a disadvantage in
every way, socially and in business. Think of the benefit
to my health alone in having regular meals and a quiet
home life. I'll be able to do twice the work I do now.
And I shouldn't wonder if Elsa wasn't a help to me even
there. She has a good httle head."

" And a dinky Httle curl beside her ear."

Bobby frowned. " So I thought I'd take the plunge."

" The snag is you've got to keep her."

" Two can live as cheaply as one."

Jimmy uttered a hollow laugh.

" You can laugh but it's true. I ran it all out with a
pencil and paper. I don't suppose I'll be coming here
much now," and he cast a elegiac glance round the busy
scene.

" Love is enough," murmured Jimmy to the last frag-
ment of his sandwhich.

" We'll be married almost at once. I don't mind
giving you a tip. It's cheaper to be married than
engaged. An engaged girl expects a devil of a lot."

CONVERSATION IN A TEA ROOM 69

" You're shrewd, Bobby."

Bobby looked at the menu. " I think I'll have some-
thing more." He was arming himself from within. He
decided on a strawberry cream waffle.

" What a thing it is to be young," mumured Jimmy,
contenting himself with a black coffee.

" Of course there is Elsa's side," said Bobby, expanding
a little over his waffle. " Pretty tough for a woman to
have to just sit and wait and perhaps the man never
comes. Elsa's a grand little girl. I'd hate to see her
— you know what I mean — left."

" She's a grand little girl but I can't see her being
left in the lurch."

" You left her."

Jimmy wondered if he had better explain. He de-
cided not to, things looked better as they were. He
knocked cigarette ash into his saucer, looked up and
there was Elsa coming towards them. He nudged Bobby.

" There she is."

Bobby looked up, and the strawberry impaled on his
fork fell back into the cream with a soft plop, for Elsa
was not alone. She clung possessively to the arm of her
escort. She was in full war paint, and wore her most
brilliant smile. She threw the two young men at the
buffet a jaunty nod to divide between them.

CONVERSATION IN A TEA ROOM

The younger woman pulled off her gloves slowly,
liberating a faint puff of powdery perfume. She had
long, narrow nails, lacquered mother-of-pearl, and her
narrow platinum wedding ring hid under other heavy
rings heavy with diamonds. She looked abstractedly

•^0 THE PERSIMMON TREE

around the tea room. It was a cave of quiet high above
the noisy street, its windows, elaborately draped, looked
On to a blind brightness that did not penetrate the room.
On each mock Jacobean table, covered with plate glass
that "gleamed faintly, giving to the light a pale watery
quality, floated three daffodils in a black glass vase. The
custom for the day had hardly began, the air was not yet
defiled with cigarette smoke nor the quiet by the clatter
of cutlery. A clean, matutinal smell of furniture polish,
of flower stems and water, added to the cool content
of the room.

She pulled in her attention slowly and with difficulty
as if it were a fish on a line, and looked at last at her
companion who was sa5dng, " What are we having,
Lois ?" They looked together at the yeUow card that
told them what they could have. Amy's hands were older,
more heavily ringed, the nails dark red. They ordered
hot buttered muffins, asparagus rolls, a plate of cakes
and black coffee with cream.

" I don't have breakfast so I'm usually hungry about
this time," Amy explained.

" I only have a squeezed grapefruit."

" Is it good ?"

" I don't know. I think I'll go back to the black
coffee."

She saw herself sitting up in bed, pale with sleep, break-
fasting on black coffee and a cigarette. She liked the
picture for she felt it was delicately depraved and knew
that if was very young of her to think so.

" Gladys Sheilds is on an all-cucumber diet. She says
it's marvellous."

Lois made a little face.

" Yes," said Amy, decisively, " that's just what I say.
What's the good of being thin if you are leathery?" She

CONVERSATION IN A TEA ROOM 71

looked with dissatisfaction at her muifin ; it was not
buttery enough. She was wondering too, why Lois had
begged her, with such soft urgency, to meet her this
morning. There was no urgency visible now, sleek little
thing.

" I've just been to the hairdresser's. How do you think
he has done me ?" Lois touched the triple row of
mathematical golden curls under the brim of her bl^ck
hat. She felt softly aware of herself in every movement.

" Your hair always looks perfect, dear, it's such a
marvellous colour."

"Oh, do you think so ? I think it's terrible to have
golden hair, nobody believes it's natural."

"Aren't women cats ?" said Amy, incontinently taking
a mirror from her handbag and peering at herself between
bites. " I can't understand it. Well, after all. . . Live
and let live is my motto. Of course, a good hairdresser
is terribly important."

" He's a Russian. He lost everything in the revolution.
He didn't actually say so, but I gathered his father was
someone very important. Just one or two things he let
slip. He told me a lot about himself."

" That's funny."

" I'm not a snob. I mean we're all here in the world
together, aren't we ?"

" Oh, I didn't mean that. Only it's generally the other
way about, isn't it ? Men's barbers talk and ladies'
hairdressers listen."

" He cQuld write a book, the things women tell him.
But I'm funny, dear, I'm not like that."

" Neither am I. But there is something in having your
hair done. . . . Intimate, isolated and temporary. And
looking' in the mirror all the time. Seeing him only in
the mirror. It's different."

Ti" THE PERSEXOIOX TREE

" How cleverl}" you put it. I'm not a bit clever."

" WTien a woman doesnt talk about herself, weD, I
alwa\-s think there's a reason, don't \-ou ? Did you say
\-our Russian was good looking ?"

" Not exactly, but arresting. And fine eyes. '

" You must give me his address. I'm sick of my man."

■' Of course, dear. But I can't promise anj'thing. He
doesn't generally do dients himself. He onlv ad%Tses."

" WeU. I could trv."

" I'm sure he'd make an exception of you if 30U told
him jou were a friend of mine."

■ Thank j'ou so much, dear. It's sweet of you."

" I sometimes think the only rest I get in the week is
at the hairdresser's."

" You are looking a httle tired, dear. But I thought
you were rather dropping out. I didn't see you at the
Thorlej's' httle do on Friday. I thought you always
went there. You are great friends, aren't you ?'"

" Len wouldn't go."

"And you gave in to him, dear, was that wise ?" Amy
leaned forward a httle, pushing aside her plate — ^the
speciahst in consultation.

" We had an a\\^ul row. "

" You mustn't let him ride roughshod over you. Now
is the time to make a stand. I don't have any trouble
with Rex because he knows he can't do without me.
He hterally can't take a step in his business without my
ad\ice. I woxildn't tell everyone that. \Miat I say is.
don't trust to love. \\'hat you want is a hold over than."

" You're so clever. "

' You don t think I'm butting in, do you. dear ?"

" Of coiu^e not, darhng."

" 1 was so sorry you missed the party. It was very
bright. I don t think (ieoige was in his usual form."

CONVERSATION IN A TEA ROOM 73

" Oh. wasn't he ?"

" They say she leads him a terrible hfe — but perhaps
it's only malicious gossip. People will say anything."

" I happen to know it's true."

" What a pity. And he so popular — especicilly with
women."

" He can't help his charm, can he ? At heart he is
very reserved."

" Oh, really ?"

The waitress laid the little yellow bill, decorously
folded, in the exact centre of the table.

" Well, I suppose we'd better. . . It has been delight-
ful seeing you, dear."

" There is nothing I love better than a good old talk."

" No, Amy, it's mine. I asked you."

" Oh, but, dear, it's my turn. You paid last time."

" Did I ? I don't remember."

" Neither do I, but I think you did."

" Well, if you only think, it is mine."

Their jewelled fingers met on the sUp of paper. They
smiled winningly at one another.

" Oh, weU "

They fumbled among the expensive furniture of their
handbags, touched their noses sohcitously with swans-
down puffs, drew on white gloves, staring past one an-
other, absorbed.

" Ready ?"

" Let's go."

They sailed out. A waitress waylaid them.

" I thought you'd paid. How silly of me."

" I thought you had. How absurd."

" Let me."

"All right, dear. It's too hot to quarrel."

74 THE PERSIMMON TREE

They walked slowly down the shallow, thickly carpeted
stairs, side by side.

" You promised me the address of your hairdresser.''

" Yes, don't let me forget."

They stood a moment in the doorway before stepping
into the bright river of the street. Lois caught Amy's arm.

" I want to ask you something. ... I wouldn't ask
if it wasn't perfectly all right. . . . Really I wouldn't.
It's only that — would you mind saying that we'd been
to a matinee together this afternoon ?"

Her eyes were wild, young, entreating in the perfect
mask of her face.

DIALOGUE AT THE BALLET

The little girl sat as far back in her stall as she could,
then she leaned forward a little ; in this way she was
able to make her skirt cover her knees. Her legs, in black
cotton stockings that had washed woolly, were tucked
away under the seat, out of sight. Her hands, in the new
cotton gloves Gran had bought her, were hidden under
her hat which she held on her lap, the elastic wound
round and round her forefinger till it had a funny, cold
rubbery feeling, a no-feeling, bUnd and dumb. Her palms
were pressed on the tight ball of her handkerchief,
braced against it. She was, precariously safe like this,
in a cave between the two large, opulent women who,
smelling of powder and scent, of kid gloves and hair-
dressers, bulged over her on either side in well-dressed
curves. Her mind could dart out, like an ant-eater's
tongue, and scoop in the amazing, lovely things that
were happening on the bright stage in the great dark.

DIALOGUE AT THE BALLET 75

hollow theatre. She was safe and even obscurely happy
so long as they talked about Their Own Things and took
no notice of her, Aunt Catherine and her friend Mrs.
Fumival. Aunt Catherine wasn't a real Aunt, she was
a godmother. Godmothers were like Santa Claus, you
didn't believe in them, only pretended to, to please
Mummie and Daddy. You couldn't call them Mrs.
Orwell-Vane, you had apparently to say " aunt." Until
today Aunt Catherine hadn't meant anything except a
dented silver mug and the funny metallic taste of hot
milk when you buried your nose in it to drink. It was
Solid Silver. Mummie talked about someome called
Kitty, who used to be Aunt Catherine but wasn't now. . .

When the lights went up, the little girl was taken by
surprise just as she had been when they went out, but she
didn't show it. She pressed hard on the handkerchief,
and her eyes, which had been knobs in the darkness,
suddenly flattened out. Aunt Catherine leaned towards
her in a puff of warm air.

" We're enjoying ourselves enormously, aren't we ?
Oh, I do wish I was a little girl seeing the ballet for the
first time. I'd love to be a little girl again, wouldn't
you, Melisande ?"

Mrs. Fumival had a name like barley sugar but she
looked like a marshmallow.

" Did you see her eyes ? As big as saucers. I got more
pleasure looking at her than at the stage."

" Please Aunt Catherine, let me look for myself !"

"The next Ballet is going to be the one you'll like.
Look on the programme, dear. There. Cendrillon. That
means Cinderella. Won't that be lovely ? You know the
story, don't you. Of course, you do. Mumsie must have
told it to you lots of times — and now you're going to see
it. My, isn't that grand ?"

76 THE PERSIMMON TREE

" Isn't she a quiet little country mouse ? Struck dunlb
with wonder, I shouldn't be surprised. You know what
country children are like. Inarticulate, poor little thing.
What would you expect, living at the back of beyond ?
But we're marvellous friends already, aren't we, Bunny ?
I invented a pet name for her coming in in the taxi.
Yes, we had a taxi all the way from her grandmother's.
Talk about the wilds of suburbia ! Bunny. Her birth-
day's at Easter. Isn't it quaint ?"

" You don't know rabbits like I do."

" Of course Nellie is a very nice name, but I wanted
something just special between ourselves."

" She thinks Nellie is common."

" I went to school with her mother. The sweetest
thing. Plenty of money in those days but they lost it.
Why she wanted to bury herself right out there in the
bush I don't know. Love's young dream and all that,
poor darhng. He never did much good. And then she
wanted me to be godmother to her first. So touching."

Darling Mummie. Poor darling little mummie. I know
why. She wanted Aunt Catherine to do things for me.
And now she has. She's taking me to the ballet.

" Four children and that cHmate. I ask you is any man
worth it ?"

She thinks I'm deaf because I live in the bush. She'd
look awful on a horse. Daddy would laugh at her. We all
would.

" The childie has come down to have her tonsils out.
Her first trip to town. I tell her it's going to be fun in
hospital after just the first tiny wee while, and she's as
brave as brave. She's ten years old. You'd hardly think
it, would you ?"

DIALOGUE AT THE BALLET 77

Gran's giving me my operation. Day after to-morrow.
It won't be as bad as when the horse kicked me.

" So I thought, even if it was a bit awkward for me
just now, I must give her a treat. Do you like your treat,
darling ?"

" There, I've let the ice cream boy go by. Never mind.
We are going to have afternoon tea after the show.
Great big scrumptous ca.kes. How will you like that ?"

No one makes cakes like my mummy's. She won two prizes
in the show.

" Funny little morsel, isn't it ? Not a word to be got
out of her. I know she's having fun though. I know.
We understand one another."

" It's so good for her to see a little beauty. I believe
in filling their little minds with beautiful things, don't
you ? It helps."

There's Fancy licking her colt, and the willows by the
creek, and the new harvester, and the paddocks after rain.
I want to go home. It's awful here.

" Would you like to go to the lav., pet ? Sure ? Quite
sure ? It's no good being obstinate. All right, but it's
rude to shake your head like that. Say 'No thank you.
Aunt Catherine.' Here's the orchestra coming back. If
I were at my first ballet I'd be wild with excitement."

Please don't smear talk all over it. Please let me see it
all by myself.

" Lool^ at the Sisters. Aren't they funny. . . . Well
I never, there's puss. . . . Isn't it dinky ?. . . . Now
we're going to see the Fairy Godmother. . . . You've
got a fairy godmother too, haven't you ?. . . . Don't
kick the seat, Nellie, it's rude. . . . Look, oh look. . . .
It's just the loveliest ballet, isn't it ? . . . There's the

7S THE PERSIMMON TREE

Prince. Hes a girl really — or isn't he ? It's quite hard
to tell with some of these people. . . . Never mind. . -
It's ver\- pretty. ... I could die laughing at those
Sisters. Clap, Bunny, clap hard to show you like it. Oh
dear, I'm afraid it's nearly over. I'm exhausted. Melis-
ande, entertaining a child is hard work if you ask me.
God Save the King. Stand still and straight, pet. Don't
fidgit, it isn't loyal. There. Did you enjoy yourself ?
Did you ? She'll find her voice in a minute. Don't you
feel just a teeny, weeny bit like Cinderella yourself,
going to the ballet in a taxi with your godmother ? Eh,
chidde ? "

■ ■ No, I don't. I hated it," said the Uttle girl in a sudden
loud voice, her face scarlet, her throat b^inning to
swell with sobs.

THE PARTY 79

THE PARTY

The footpath rang under her feet as if the hill were
hollow. She had not been there before, and was con-
vinced that she would not find her way. She stared
incredulously at the street numbers and sought out, with
a kind of fumbling desperation, like one learning braille,
the landmarks that Rhonda had given her. She was late,
and would probably be the last to arrive even at that
sort of party. She had dawdled and dawdled, still thing-
ing that perhaps she might not go, only in the end not
going had proved worse than going. Not going would be
a chasm of disappointment. It was enough to be late,
she thought now, like the frightened man who believes
his yawns will convince the world of his indifference.

This was the block of flats. An imitation stone stair-
case, mock baronial, mock grandeur, and behind the
closed doors with their heavy antique knockers the same
ordinary little flats, the same inescapable amenities. To
the third floor. It wasn't only the stairs that made
her heart beat so fast and high. It is shattering to go
up to a smug, unknown door and ring the bell, knowing
that a party lurks behind it. A close knit, if temporary,
whole, a world whipped up out of conversation and
sherry, to which she, the late comer, would be a stranger
and an outcast, no matter how well she might know
people. In the tight fitting, black frock that revealed so
delicately the slender lines of her body, she felt that her
heart was indecently exposed.

Well, she'd taken the plunge. A room full of people,
all standing up, all holding wine glasses, talking as if
they knew on another much better than they did, eating
sausage rolls and gherkins. She knew at once. John

80 THE PERSIMMON TREE

/

wasn't there. There wasn't a hopeful corner of the rootn
you couldn't see at the first glance.

Rhonda was beside her, in her eyes the look that said
" My poor darling, how are you ?" The terrible, tender
solicitude of a friend who knows and understands every-
thing. But she only said, " I'll find Agnes for you."
Old fashioned to be embarrassed because you did not
know your hostess. But if I am I am, so what can I do
about it? This was Agnes, wearing a snood. What in-
credible affectation to wear a snood at your own party
as if you had just arrived out of the blue, and hadn't
been cutting sandwiches and impaling little what-nots
on toothpicks all the afternoon. " So very kind. . . "
she said, and yes, she knew nearly everyone. Agnes you
could see was the soul of kindness. Now she had gone
to fetch someone. " You must meet. ... so much in
common." It was just as if she had said kindly, con-
fidentially, " Now I'll go and get you a nice strong cup
of tea and you will be all right." What she was likely to
have in common with anyone, she couldn't imagine.
She felt rather as she might have done if she had
wandered into the party, wearing a diving bell. . . .

There was a solid wall of conversation, unscalable,
impenetrable. " Mallarme," someone said. So they still
talked about Mallarme at parties. "In Spain. . ."some-
one said. You always counted four points if you had been
in Spain. Russia counted double, and London in the
blitz came somewhere in between. You could be nos-
talgic over Paris, but not over London, for after all,
London had taken it and Paris hadn't.

" My dear," said a strange young man solicitously.
"You have nothing to drink."

With a wine glass in her hand, she felt herself im-
measurably better equipped. Someone touched her arm.

THE PARTY 81

She thought for a bUnd second that it might be John,
but it was Agnes with the soul mate. A dark young man
with a scar. She looked at him with an enquiring smile,
and took a slow sip. That was better. She was getting
the hang of it now. She would be able, after all, to give
a very good imitation of herself this afternoon.

" You sculpt, don't you ?" he said.

" No," and then idiotically because it was like the
snapping of a very thin life line. "I'm sorry. I would
like to."

" You mean," he asserted, " that you do but you think
you're only at the beginning. There isn't any beginning,
only a circle."

" No," she said, fighting desperately now against the
clay. " I mean no. I never thought of it. . . ."

" You have a sculptor's hands," he asserted.

In a moment it had become a nightmare conversation.
She felt herself entangled in a net of meaningless words.
She drifted into a group for protection, and when she
drifted out she left him behind her.

" Darling, where have you been hiding ? I haven't
seen you for ages."

"My dear, you are actually thinner, some people have
all the luck."

" Don't slip away before I've told you what I'm doing.
I've given up the violin and I'm working in a factory.
It's more satisfactory. The pattern is so much thicker ..."

No one even mentioned John. He might have been dead
or forgotten, like a stone at the bottom of a well.

There was a picture on the wall, a red mouth with a
Mona Lisa smile, set crookedly on a grey background.
Just that and nothing more. A shutter flipped up in
her mind and she saw it, really saw it. It was improbable
but quite real. The solicitous young man stood before

82 THE PERSIMMON TREE

her, a plate in each hand. " Oyster patties or sausage
rolls ?" It was one of those cryptic, irretrievable choices
— heaven or hell and nothing to guide you. The casket
scene. She wouldn't have either and he was disappointed
to the point of despair. He had a beautiful maternal
lust to feed people.

She moved on. She hadn't noticed the door behind
the curtain. It came to softly behind her, leaving her in
sudden quiet and enlargement. It was as easy to escape
as that. The balcony, hanging hke a bird cage on the
cliffhke facade of the flats, was as far from the party as
Cape York. It was early dusk with its false evanescent
clarity beginning to melt at the edges, a Hght that blent
the noonday incompatibles into a scena. In the fore-
ground, blocks of flats set at all angles, each flat a httle
box too small for the life it housed, so that it bulged
out of the windows, hung over the balconies, burgeoned
up through the roofs. Strings of coloured washing were
as natural as vines. In WiUiam Street, narrow and Hving
as an artery, coloured taxis moved like corpuscles. Over
to the left, Woolloomooloo, pouring down the hill, houses,
terraces, narrow streets fused into a solid mass, a
grape bloom on its slates, a veil of Ught on the medioc-
rity of its stones and bricks. Beneath the swept stretch
of the waterfront, the wharves running neatly out into
the bay. Beyond the lovely, unreal drop scene of the
harbour, blue water, timbered headlcinds, even the bridge
etherealised, a grey bow drawn across the blue.

Her constricted heart dilated as if to the sweep of
music. She could stand and look for a minute, her palms
pressed to the roughness of brick, forgetting everything.
Then her mind began to tear at its knot again. " Why
had John not come ? Was it because he thought she
might be there ? Or for no reason so definite, because

THE PARTY 83

he had forgotten the occasion, the time or the place. . . .
the indifference of his freedom in which everything
e^•entually was lost !"

The dark \'oung man with the scar had found the
door too.

" I lost you," he said.

That didn't need an answer, but she picked up her
wine glass from the parapet.

" Tell me," he said, " what do \ou do ?"

" Nothing." she said. " That's killed it," she thought,
and then, because that sudden sweep of music had left
her defenceless, she began to tell him what she saw.
" If I lived here I'd throw a line out of the window
ever\- night, and eAery morning I'd haul in a short story."

" Writing." He drove the metal of his contempt into
the word. " That's no good. You can imagine anything
at all and write it dowTV. No limits and no discipline,
it's only a hide-out for people who haven't fmything to
say."

That didn't fetch her because he couldn't possibly say
anything that touclied her now. She felt indifference
like a dead weight.

" You're the sort," he said with the insolence of a
man who succeeds with women, " You're the sort who
promises everytliing and gives nothing."

In a small cold \oice she said, " I would like another
glass of wine and something to eat."

" Certainly." He held the door for her to enter.

In the crowded room conversation was already in a
more advanced state. One cannot afford to drop out.
Talking is. hke drinking, progressive. When you aie a
few drinks behind everyone else, you are in a different
world.

84 THE PERSIMMON TREE

Rhonda caught her fingers in a quick, affectionate
squeeze. " It's a nice party, isn't it ?" she said en-
couragingly.

It was a nice party.

" I'm so glad you clicked with Simon. He is doing
something and going somewhere even if he is the world's
greatest egoist."

The something in common.

She told Agnes that she had a dinner engagement,
that she'd have to tear herself away.

One of the boys, Agnes said, would see her down. . . .

Please, please. . . . everyone was so happy. Let her
just slip away. It was so easy to break up a party. . . .

She went into the bedroom. A stout woman had taken
her shoes off because they hurt her, and was sitting on
a low chair, smoking. Another was re-making her face
very earnestly in a small mirror. Two more lounged on
the bed. There was the intimate ease of women off
parade, a freshet of laughter, a fragment of story like a
tit-bit among gulls. Politely they suspended their con-
versation, politely made way for her. In the mirror she
saw with surprise that the delicate mask of her make-up
was still intact. She said good-bye, not remembering
ever to have seen these women before.

She pulled the front door to after her. The air was
suddenly cool, thin and flavoured with plaster. Three
flights of imitation stone stairs, mock baronial, mock
grandeur. In the street it was almost dark. She looked
up and saw the lighted windows of the flat, golden in
the blue dusk. She had left a world that, if it wasn't
safe, was at least warm. It was being alone that was
so terrible.

FIGHTING IN VIENNA 85

FIGHTING IN VIENNA

It was to buy bird-seed that Kathie, Fraulein von Hillse,
decided to risk a journey through the streets. There was
nothing left in the blue lacquered tin with the Japanese
pagoda design that was almost worn off with long use.
Long ago, before the war, when they were just beginning
to be sweethearts, Johann had given her this tin filled
with the most elegant little biscuits, nut shaped ones
filled with chocolate paste, heart shapes covered with
pink sugar crystals, candied violets in little baskets of
macaroon. You didn't see things like that in Vienna
now, not even for the rich tourists. It had just been one
of many little gifts, hyacinths growing in pots, boxes of
crystallised fruits, books, not very much heeded, but it
had outlived them all. Even now Kathie could not handle
it without a curious feeling as if a door somewhere had
swung open, and the breath of a long dead springtime
wafted across her senses. It stirred in her quite auto-
matically a little pulse of homesickness, of nostalgia.
Rather a faded emotion, but there.

Elsa coming at dusk yesterday with a basket of pro-
visions, had not thought of canary seed. It was like Elsa
to have come herself, to make nothing at all of the risk
she ran. All through the dark years since the war Elsa
had been the one fixed and steady light in Kathie's
world — Elsa who could make sacrifices without repining,
take burdens without comment, Elsa who had come
yesterday through the dangerous streets with their spor-
adic fighting, which no one seemed able to foretell, to
provision Kathie, so that she would not have to go out,
even though she herself was distracted by fear and
anxiety.

86 THE PERSIMMON TREE

" Franz," she said slowly, her long white capable hands
deftly unpacking the basket, " hasn't been home for
two days." Then after a puase " Hermann is in Berlin.
I've been to the hospitals. I'll try them again."

" Let me come with you," Kathie urged.

" It's easier for one. I'm less frightened alone," Elsa
said. " I'll be quite safe, I know that." There was a note
of despair in her voice as if she had tried to make a bar-
gain with God, offering her hfe for her son's, and it had
been refused.

Kathie had promised that she would stay quietly at
home until things settled down, but now she was faced
by the empty tin. It made her feel more forlorn, lonely,
and shut up, than anything else had done. At last
she really felt threatened. She looked at the bird in the
cage, her little friend. It was natural for her to suffer,
or so it seemed now, but not for him. She really did feel
that he was her friend, her darling. When she came back
to her small apartment each afternoon from the Univer-
sity, where Hermann, Elsa's husband, had got her a
clerical job, he jumped about in his cage and chirped.
He welcomed her. When she opened the cage as she
often did, he fluttered round the room and came to perch
on her hand. She loved the feel of his tiny fragile claws.
He was not in the least afraid of her. She could even
hold him in her closed hand and feel him vibrating with
life and the tiny heart beating against her fingertips.
He would draw his head back then and look at her first
out of one beady eye and then out of the other, so know-
ing, so sure. And he sang. When Frau Miiller worked
the sewing machine in the room next door, when the
sun came streaming into the room in the afternoon, and
sometimes for no reason at all except that he was happy,
song came pouring from his little throat. Yesterday,

FIGHTING IN VIENNA 87

when the machine gun had been whining and stuttering
in the street, he had tried to sing it down. Never had he
sung so bravely. She almost feared his heart would burst.

Fraulein Kathie had a very strange thought about her
bird sometimes, which she never told to anyone. It was
that he was in some curious way herself, the gay and for-
tunate Kathie, who had been young and sought after and
had loved Johann, long ago before the war. Nearly twenty
years ago. It was as if the bird were her own singing
heart so long silent in her breast. He was the happiness
that was no longer hers, but yet shared her room with
her. When he sang, something was released in her.
Something that she thought would never answer again,
replied to him.

Fraulein Kathie put on her hat and coat. After all it
was not far to Schlesmann's shop where she could buy
the seed and a chillie or two. She opened the shutter a
little and looked out. The street was very quiet— -shut-
tered windows, bolted doors, tight lipped house with
blank faces, no one passing to and fro. There hadn't
been any firing since yesterday. That hadn't been so
very terrible either, just some rifle shots and then the
nervous rattle and stutter of the machine gun. There
had been nothing to see even then but dust in the street,
some fallen plaster from a cornice, and a dark, insigni-
ficant looking huddle of clothes at the corner that was
nevertheless a man's body. Kathie had not been fright-
ened or excited — only, when the bird sang, a little exalted.
Emotions did not come readily to her now. It was as
if she had to lift a weight off her heart before she could
feel anything. All her emotions, even the pride and joy
she felt in the brilliant boy, Franz, even her fear for him
now, came to her slowly and with difficulty.

88 THE PERSIMMON TREE

It was strange in the deserted streets. Kathie remem-
bered a day when she was a child and instead of
going to school, had run away to play alone under the
lilacs in the Stadtpark, to walk alone, guilty and happy,
through the white surf of daisies on the spring lawns.
Even the air had felt different on her cheek. It did
today.

It was only a few minutes walk to Schlesmann's shop.
When she got there the door was shut and planks had
been roughly nailed over the one small window. The
broken glass was swept up against the wall. Peering
between the boards Kathie saw the trampled litter of
the interior. It had been looted. Poor old Schlesmann,
what had become of him ? Kathie went on, a few blocks
away there was another little shop.

Here was a house that she knew well. It had been
burnt, and on all the neighbouring walls were pale
furrows and nicks where bullets had passed. Round the
next corner she found a barricade across the street and
a posse of soldiers. Kathie stopped, not quite knowing
what to do. A young lieutenant came towards her.
" You cannot pass this way, Fraulein. If you are wise
you will go home." He spoke to her quietly and cour-
teously. He was a nice boy, she thought, not more than
twenty years old, a true Viennese, fair oval face, full lips
and heavy lidded eyes. Kathie moved away obediently
in the direction she had come.

Then a sudden thought came and she stood still,
shocked. The young lieutenant reminded her of Franz.
And they, Franz and he, were enemies. Franz was a
rebel, he who had never suffered anything in his own
person, who was protected by his father's position but
must generously, recklessly throw himself into a lost
cause, flinging himself against the iron wall of the new

FIGHTING IN VIENNA 89

tyrany to make a new world where, her sick heart told
her, not even the materials of a new world were left.
Franz, making them all unhappy, despising his father's
money for the way it was earned, although he couldn't
escape its benefit, despising his mother for her marriage,
although it had meant his birth, not understanding at
all the sacrifice she had made, that she continued to make.
Franz and that young heutenant cancelling out.

Kathie walked on quickly. Presently she came out in
the Ring, the wide boulevarde that circles the heart of
Vienna and rims where the old city wall used to stand.
Here there was more traffic but not much, swift closed
cars, a lorry with soldiers, a few pedestrians. The hand-
some buildings, that lined it, looked serenely down. "The
lovely shell of Vienna," thought Kathie, " but there is
no health or prosperity left in her." That seemed an old,
old thought.

She would cross the Ring in the direction of the Prater ;
there were plenty of small shops there in the labyrinth
of streets. They could not all have been looted. She
would tap on a side door, buy her seed furtively and
quickly and hurry home. Already she was feeling tired.
There was tension in these unnaturally quiet streets.

A young man began to run. In the distance, from the
direction of the University, Kathie heard several shots.
A church bell, wild, terrible, insistant, began to ring,
clashing Eind clajtnouring. Under its hghtning there came
presently the thunder of lorries. There was now a ner-
vous staccato fusilade of shots. Presently the machine
guns would start. That was how it began, this feverish,
sporadic fighting. First a dead calm, silent, waiting, an
isolated shot or two, then almost at once a frenzy of
excitement, a sort of nerve storm, hysterical courage and
wanton destruction. No one seemed to know from which

90 THE PERSIMMON TREE

house the firing might b^;in at any time. The conflict
had no definite outlines, it came and went hke an ague,
more a matter of ner\'es than passion. When it died
down again, the ambulances came and took the wounded
to the hospitals, the dead to the morgue, the fire brigade
turned out and extinguished the fires. The poUce nailed
planks over shattered windows, and cleared the glass out
of the way. They even went about arresting people. All
neat and orderly and according to r^ulations.

Kathie stood on the kerb nervously buttoning and un-
buttoning her glove. In a moment every^ing was
changed, people were running, mounted troops, coming at
the gallop, followed lorries with machine guns, other bells
further away, b^an to ring. Behind the troops came
two ambulances. Kathie began to walk with nervous,
jerky steps in the direction of the University-. She had no
very clear idea of what she was doing, the wild clamour
of the bells in her ears dazed her. All at once they stopped
and the soimd of the fighting crackled and blazed on the
tingling silence. Nobody noticed Fraulein Kathie. There
were a lot of soldiers about, but no one told her to go
back. She had a confused idea that she ought to do some-
thing, that now at last she was going to wake from her
dumb, hurt letharg\-. She would do her part. Perhaps
Franz was down there, she would find him and bring
him home ; perhaps he was hurt.

It all happened around the University, familiar ground,
where she had gone to work each day until the Univer-
sity was closed by the Authorities a fortnight ago. She
was nearer now and cojild see what was happening. The
students had made a sortie and were fighting fiercely
round one of the army lorries for a machine gun. They
were evidently in possession of one of the buildings, and
firing from the windows. The machine gun was silent.

FIGHTING IN VIENNA 91

Kathie could hear the words of command quite clearly,
saw the soldiers kneeling to fire into the crowd. " Why,"
she thought, "I'm in action !"

So this was what it was like. She thought of Johann,
who was dead, and Franz, who was lost, and of the bird
in the cage at home, singing his little heart out. She
did not feel afraid. A bullet hit the wall behind her,
then another one, glancing off again. She felt a sudden
fiery stab between her shoulders and for a second did
not understand what had happened. Someone was run-
ning towards her. She thought it was Franz or the young
lieutenant. Then blackness bubbled up in her throat and
she fell.

The sun crept across the face of the apartment building
and, finding the chink in the shutter, streamed into
Fraulein Kathie's deserted room. It fell on the table,
where the empty tin with the pagoda design lay, it
touched the faded photo of a young man in uniform,
found the bird cage on the wall. The room had been
dim and silent all day, the canary had hopped about on
the floor of his cage picking up the seeds he usually
despised. Now he sang.

Frau Miiller, in the room across the passage, said
" There's that bird." She went over and tapped at
Fraulein von Hillse's door. It was still locked. " She'll
have gone to her sister's," she thought. "It's well to
have rich relations these days, though I don't know that
I'd like a Nazi for a brother-in-law."

The sun passed on. The bird did not sing again that
day.

Kathie lay in the hospital. She did not know anything
as definite as that. She was wrapped in a thick hot haze

92 THE PERSIUMOX TREE

She was made of haze herself, and would float away
except that a red hot stake was driven through her. She
tried to get free because there was something she must
do. It was terribly important, but she did not know what
it was. The more she struggled the more it hurt. Red
flames mounting in the night, flames hke beUs.
" I must sing," thought Kathie.

The doctor asked the sister if the patient had recovered
consciousness.

' No, Herr Doktor."

" And j^ou do not know who she is }et ?"

" No, Herr Doktor, there have been no enquiries yet."

The doctor held the lanquid hand, taking the pulse.

He made a Uttle significant grimace and exchanged a

glance with the sister. There was something final in the

way he laid Kathie's hand down again on the bed.

The sister was emboldened to ask him a question,
although it was against the etiquette of the occasion.
" Herr Doktor, how is the boy in Xo. 27 ?"
The doctor answered negUgently but without offence,
" He'll recover all right but he may lose his hand.
The bomb, you know. ..."

Thev moved on to the next bed.

There was only a drop of water left in the small vessel
hooked on to the side of the canarj-'s cage, and there was
no seed left at all. Yet when, on the third afternoon of
his loneliness the stmbeam through the chink in the
shutter reached him, he semg again, lifting his head and
ruffling his feathers. Frau Miiller did not hear him, for she
had fled from Vienna. Xobody was to hear him sing again.

In the confusion of pain and darkness that was Kathie's
mind a httle space cleared, a rift of shining clcuity. It

FIGHTING IN VIENNA 93

seemed to be not in herself but in the sky above her,
something she must struggle towards. Her eyes were
open, she turned her head very slowly from side to side.
The sister came to her bed and bent over her, a clear
young face between the folds of her coif. Kathie struggled
with a question. She wanted to ask if Franz had been
found. The words seemed to waver like smoke from her
lips, but she heard herself say, " Johann. . . . where is
he ? Is he all right ?"

" He's all right," said the sister soothingly.

Kathie remembered. She had seen him running towards
her in the street but he had been in uniform. Something
terrible had been happening. Her struggling, questioning
eyes remained fixed on the sister's face. The girl bent
closer and said clearly and slowly, " Johann is safe and
well. It's all right."

Kathie felt cool light spread over her. She understood.
She had been ill. This was a hospital. She had been
very ill for a long time and had terrible dreams. She
had thought Johann was dead. She knew just where the
bad dream had begun. She was with Elsa in their little
sitting room. Elsa's long golden plaits fell one over each
shoulder. Mama said, " Elsa, when will you put your
hair up ? You are too old to wear it like that."

" But I don't want to grow up. Mama," cried Elsa.
" I want to stay just like this for ever and ever." And
she began to twirl round the room humming a waltz.

There was a ring at the front door, a long, loud, mas-
culine rin%. " There's Johann come to take you riding in
the Prater," said Elsa. But it was not Johann, it was
Hermann to see Elsa. Elsa turned away, flushing and
naughty. " I won't see him," she said. " Tell him I've
gone into a convent, and have smallpox."

94 THE PERSIMMON TREE

While they had been laughing and whispering Johann
had come in. He looked so changed, older and sterner.
He had terrible news. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand
had been assassinated at Serajevo. The air seemed to clot
about them. " This will mean war," said Johann. She
fingered the braid on his breast and put her arms round
his neck, to hold him. What agony to lift her arms, a
pain that dashed in a surf upon her brain, blotting out
all thought.

Kathie's lips were moving, but no one could hear what
she said. She was talking to Johann, and the words
seemed to run straight out of her heart without the effort
of speaking.

" Darling, darUng, darling, I've had such a bad dream.
Your hand, Liebchen, I thought you'd lost your right
hand. You came back from the war and there was
nothing for you, only me, and I wasn't enough." Kathie
tried to laugh, but she couldn't do that just yet. "Your
father was dead and there wasn't any money and what
could you do with only one hand, and so many men with
two hands looking for work ? Little Elsa married Her-
mann— I thought that too — she did it to save us all
from going under, starving perhaps, and we let her
although we hated the way Hermann got his money, out
of everyone's suffering. Such a terrible, dark, defeated
winter, darling. The worst thing of all was that I couldn't
help you, Johann. I wanted you to marry me and let
Elsa help vis to live somehow, just cower together in a
tiny, tiny room, keeping one another alive, keeping our
Uttle flame of love and happiness aUve till times got
better. You wouldn't, Johann. I thought if I loved you
enough I could make up for everything. But I coulthi't.
You'd been through too much to want lo\<;. You
couldn't love or hope. But you were so quiet and gentle.

FIGHTING IN VIENNA 95

Just sat with your useless arm . . . Life couldn't ever have
been as bad as that dream, could it, Johann ? Things
like that couldn't happen really, could they ? God
wouldn't let them. You didn't even tell me what was in
your mind, you tried to comfort me. Then it was spring
again. The lilac came out just as usual as if nothing had
happened that winter. I could smell it in the streets
and I thought, walking home, that everything would be
better now. I'd get you out into the sunshine and you'd
be healed. But you weren't at home, you weren't any-
where, you'd thrown yourself into the canal, like so
many others. . . "

A low, moaning cry came from Kathie's lips. " Poor
soul," thought the old woman in the next bed, " if only
she could go."

That day the canary did not sing. He sat huddled on
the perch, his beak open, gasping. A fine dust had settled
on ever5d;hing in the room, even, it seemed, on the eyes
of the bird.

Miraculously, Elsa was there beside the bed, holding
her hand, calling her name, forcing her up through turbid
waters. Five days had changed Kathie very much, her
face was shrunk and small, her lips cracked with fever.
Her eyes, dark and troubled, looked from another world.

There was a white screen around the bed, and, although
she smiled, Elsa was weeping. The sister stood beside her.

There ^^as an immense question in Kathie's eyes. Her
spirit was saying to her body," Why are you suffering
so ? Can I be dying ?" But they did not know that.
Elsa tried to answer that look.

" Franz is safe," she said slowly, distinctly. " He's

96 THE PERSIMMON TREE

here. He was hurt the day you were. His poor hand. . . .
but he won't die."

" Johann," whispered Kathie.

" I'll take him right away from Vienna. We'll begin
again." The sister made a little warning movement.

Kathie's mind was pulling itself free, with terrible
agonising jerks coming back to reality. She must tell
Elsa about the empty tin.

" I couldn't," she whispered. " Schlesmann's. . . ."

" What did she say," asked Elsa. The sister shook
her head.

Kathie was trying to raise herself, beating agonised
hands against the pain and the darkness. " He sang."
she said quite clearly.

Then the stake was drawn out of her breast. She was
free. There rose in her a fountain of blood, of tears, of
song.

A small untidy heap of ruffled feathers lay on the floor
of the bird cage, the tiny, claw-like feet stood stiffly up.
The sunlight found only silence and dust. Outside, the
street was awaking, shutters were opened cautiously,
vehicles passed. Life began again.

THE LOTTERY 97

THE LOTTERY

The first that Ted Bilborough knew of his wife's good
fortune was when one of his friends, bji elderiy wag, shook
his hand with mock gravity and murmured a few words
of manly but inappropriate S5Tnpathy. Ted didn't know
what to make of it. He had just stepped from the stair-
way on to the upper deck of the 6.15 p.m. ferry from
town. Fred Lewis seemed to have been waiting for him,
and as he looked about he got the impression of news-
papers and grins and a little flutter of half derisive
excitement, all focused on himself. Everything seemed
to bulge towards him. It must be some sort of leg pull.
He felt his assurance threatened, and the comer of his
mouth twitched uncomfortably in his fat cheek, as he
tried to assume a hard boiled manner.

" Keep the change, laddie," he said.

" He doesn't know, actually he doesn't know."

" Your wife's won the lottery !"

" He won't believe you. Show him the paper. There
it is as plain as my nose. Mrs. Grace Bilborough, 52
Cuthbert Street." A thick, stained forefinger pointed to
the words. " First prize £50C0 Last Hope Syndicate."

" He's taking it very hard," said Fred Lewis, shaking
his head.

They began thumping him on the back. He had travel-
led on that ferry every week-day for the last ten years,
barring a fortnight's holiday in January, and he knew
nearly everyone. Even those he didn't know entered into
the spirit of it. Ted filled his pipe nonchalantly but
with unsteady fingers. He was keeping that odd unsteady-
ness, that seemed to begin somewhere deep in his chest,
to himself. It was a wonder that fellows in the office

98 THE PERSIMMON TREE

hadn't got hold of this, but they had been busy today m
the hot loft under the chromium pipes of the pneumatic
system, sending down change and checking up on credit
accounts. Sale time. Grace might have let him know.
She could have rung up from Thompson's. Bill was
always borrowing the lawn mower and the step ladder,
so it would hardly be asking a favour in the circumstances.
But that was Grace all over.

"If I can't have it myself, you're the man I like to
see get it."

They meant it too. Everyone liked Ted in a kind sort of
way. He was a good fellow in both senses of the word.
Not namby pamby, always ready for a joke but a good
citizen too, a good husband and father. He wasn't the
sort that refused to wheel the perambulator. He flour-
ished the perambulator. His wife could hold up her head,
they payed their bills weekly and he even put something
away, not much but something, and that was a triumph
the way things were, the ten per cent knocked off his
salary in the depression not restored yet, and one thing
and another. And always cheerful, with a joke for every-
one. All this was vaguely present in Ted's mind. He'd
always expected in a trusting sort of way to be rewarded,
but not through Grace.

" What are you going to do with it, Ted ?"

" You won't see him for a week, he's going on a jag."
This was very funny because Ted never did, not even on
Anzac Day.

A voice with a grievance said, not for the first time
" I've had shares in a ticket every week since it started,
and I've never won a cent." No one was interested.

" You'll be going off for a trip somewhere ?"

" They'll make you president of the Tennis Club and
you'll have to donate a silver cup."

THE LOTTERY 99

They were flattering him underneath the jokes.

" I expect Mrs. Bilborough will want to put some of
it away for the children's future," he said. It was almost
as if he were giving an interview to the press, and he
was pleased with himself for saying the right thing. He
always referred to Grace in public as Mrs. Bilborough.
He had too nice a social sense to say " the Missus."

Ted let them talk, and looked out of the window. He
wasn't interested in the news in the paper tonight. The
little boat vibrated fussily, and left a long wake like
moulded glass in the quiet river. The evening, was draw-
ing in. The sun was sinking into a bank of grey cloud,
soft and formless as mist. The air was dusky, so that its
light was closed into itself and it was easy to look at, a
thick golden disc more like a moon rising through smoke
than the sun. It threw a single column of orange light
on the river, the ripples from the ferry fanned out into
it, and their tiny shadows truncated it. The bank, rising
steeply from the river and closing it in till it looked like
a lake, was already bloomed with shadows. The shapes
of two churches and a broken frieze of pine trees stood
out against the gentle sky, not sharply, but with a soft
arresting grace. The slopes, wooded and scattered with
houses, were dim and sunk in idyllic peace. The river
showed thinly bright against the dark land. Ted could
see that the smooth water was really a pale tawny
gold with patches, roughened by the turning tide, of
frosty blue. It was only when you stared at it and con-
centrated your attention that you realised the colours.
Turning to look down stream away from the sunset, the
water gleamed silvery grey with dark clear scrabblings
upon it. There were two worlds, one looking towards the
sunset with the dark land against it dreaming and still,
and the other looking down stream over the silvery river

100 THE PERSIMMON TREE

to the other bank, on which all the light concentrated.
Houses with windows of orange fire, black trees, a great
silver gasometer, white oil tanks with the look of clumsy
mushrooms, buildings serrating the sky, even a suggestion
seen or imagined of red roofs, showing up miraculously
in that airy light.

" Five thousand pounds," he thought. " Five thousand
pounds." Five thousand pounds at five per cent, five
thousand pounds stewing gently in its interest, making
old age safe. He could do almost anything he could think
of with five thousand pounds. It gave bis mind a
stretched sort of feeling, just thinking of it. It was hard
to connect five thousand pounds with Grace. She might
have let him know. And where had the five and three-
pence to buy the ticket come from ? He couldn't help
wondering about that. When you budgeted as carefully
as they did there wasn't five and threepence over. If
there had been, well, it wouldn't have been over at all,
he would have put it in the bank. He hadn't noticed
any difference in the housekeeping, and he prided himself
he noticed everything. Surely she hadn't been running
up bills to buy lottery tickets. His mind darted here
and there suspiciously. There was something secretive in
Grace, and he'd thought she told him everything. He'd
taken it for granted, only, of course, in the ordinary run
there was nothing to tell. He consciously relaxed the
knot in his mind. After all, Grace had won the five
thousand pounds. He remembered charitably that she
had always been a good wife to him. As he thought that
he had a vision of the patch on his shirt, his newly washed
cream trousers laid out for tennis, the children's neatness,
the tidy house. That was being a good wife. And he had
been a good husband, always brought his money home
and never looked at another woman. Their's was a model

THE LOTTERY 101

home, everyone acknowledged it, but — well — somehow he
found it easier to be cheerful in other people's homes
than in his own. It was Grace's fault. She wasn't cheery
and easy going. Something moody about her now.
Woody. He'd worn better than Grjace, anyone could see
that, and yet it was he who had had the hard time. All
she had to do was to stay at home and look after the
house and the children. Nothing much in that. She
always seemed to be working, but he couldn't see what
there was to do that could take her so long. Just a touch
of woman's perversity. It wasn't that Grace had aged.
Ten years married and with two children, there was still
something girlish about her — raw, hard girlishness that
had never mellowed. Grace was — Grace, for better or
for worse. Maybe she'd be a bit brighter now. He could
not help wondering how she had managed the five and
three. If she could shower five and threes about like that,
he'd been giving her too much for the housekeeping. And
why did she want to give it that damnfool name " Last
Hope." That meant there had been others, didn't it ?
It probably didn't mean a thing, just a lucky tag.

A girl on the seat opposite was sewing lace on silkies
for her trousseau, working intently in the bad light.
" Another one starting out," Ted thought.

" What about it ?" said the man beside him.

Ted hadn't been listening.

The ferry had tied up at his landing stage and Ted got
off. He tried not to show in his walk that his wife had

it

won £5000. He felt jaunty and tired at once. He walked
up the hill with a bunch of other men, his neighbours.
They were still teasing him about the money, they didn't
know how to stop. It was a very still, warm evening. As
the sun descended into the misty bank on the horizon it

102 THE PERSIMMON TREE

picked out the delicate shapes of clouds invisibly sunk in
the mass, outlining them with a fine thread of gold.

One by one the men dropped out, turning into side
streets or opening garden gates till Ted was alone with a
single companion, a man who lived in a semi-detached
cottage at the end of the street. They were suddenly
very quiet and sober. Ted felt the ache round his mouth
where he'd been smiling and smiling.

" I'm awfully glad you've had this bit of luck."

"I'm sure you are, Eric," Ted answered in a subdued
voice.

" There's nobody I'd sooner see have it."

" That's very decent of you."

" I mean it."

" Well, well, I wasn't looking for it."

" We could do with a bit of luck like that in our house."

" I bet you could."

" There's an instalment on the house due next month,
and Nellie's got to come home again. Bob can't get
anything to do. Seems as if we'd hardly done pa3dng for
the wedding."

" That's bad."

" She's expecting, so I suppose Mum and Dad will be
let in for all that too."

" It seems only the other day Nellie was a kid getting
round on a scooter."

" They grow up," Eric agreed. " It's the instalmeiit
that's the rub. First of next month. They expect it on
the nail too. If we hadn't that hanging over us it
wouldn't matter about Nellie coming home. She's our
girl, and it'll be nice to have her about the place again."

" You'll be as proud as a cow with two tails when
you're a grandpa."

" I suppose so."

THE LOTTERY 103

They stood mutely by Eric's gate. An idea began to
flicker in Ted's mind, and with it came a feeling of sweet-
ness and happiness and power such as he had never ex-
pected to feel.

" I won't see you stuck, old man," he said.

" That's awfully decent of you."

" I mean it."

They shook hands as they parted. Ted had only a few
steps more and he took them slowly. Very warm and
dry, he thought. The garden will need watering. Now
he was at his gate. There was no one in sight. He stood
for a moment looking about him. It was as if he saw the
house he had lived in for ten years, for the first time.
He saw that it had a mean, narrow-chested appearance.
The roof tiles were discoloured, the woodwork needed
painting, the crazy pavement that he had laid with such
zeal had an unpleasant flirtatious look. The revolutionary
thought formed in his mind. " We might leave here."
Measured against the possibilities that lay before him,
it looked small and mean. Even the name, " Emoh
Ruo," seemed wrong, pokey.

Ted was reluctant to go in. It was so long since any-
thing of the least importance had happened between
him and Grace, that it made him shy. He did not know
how she would take it. Would she be all in a dither and
no dinner ready ? He hoped so but feared not.

He went into the hall, hung up his hat and shouted in
a big blufl voice " Well, well, well, and where's my rich
wife ?"

Grace was in the kitchen dishing dinner.

" You're late," she said. "The dinner's spoiling."

The children were quiet but restless, anxious to leave
the table and go out to play. " I got rid of the reporters,"
Grace said in a flat voice. Grace had character, trust her

104 THE PERSIMMON TREE

to handle a couple of cub reporters. She didn't seem to
want to talk about it to her husband either. He felt
himself, his voice, his stature dwindhng. He looked at
her with hard eyes. " Where did she get the money,"
he wondered again, but more sharply.

Presently they were alone. There was a pause. Grace
began to clear the table. Ted felt that he must do some-
thing. He took her awkwardly into his arms. " Gracie,
aren't you pleased ?"

She stared at him a second then her face seemed to
fall together, a sort of spasm, something worse than tears.
But she twitched away from him. "Yes," she said, picking
up a pile of crockery and making for the kitchen. He
followed her.

" You're a dark horse, never telling me a word about
it."

" She's like a Red Indian," he thought. She moved
about the kitchen with quick nervous movements. After
a moment she answered what was in his mind :

" I sold mother's ring and chain. A man came tp the
door buying old gold. I bought a ticket every week till
the money was gone."

" Oh," he said. Grace had sold her mother's wedding
ring to buy a lottery ticket.

" It was my money."

" I didn't say it wasn't."

" No, you didn't."

The plates chattered in her hands. She was evidently
feeling something, and feeling it strongly. But Ted
didn't know what. He couldn't make her out.

She came and stood in front of him, her back to the
littered table, her whole body taut. " I suppose you're
wondering what I'm going to do ? I'll tell you. I'm

THE LOTTERY 105

going away. By myself. Before it is too late. I'm going
tomorrow."

He didn't seem to be taking it in.

" Beattie will come and look after you and the children.
She'll be glad to. It won't cost you a penny more than it
does now," she added.

He stood staring at her, his flacid hands hanging down,
his face sagging.

" Then you meant what it said in the paper, " Last
Hope ?" he said.

" Yes," she answered.

106 THE PERSIMMON TREE

SUNDAY

John preferred to walk up from the ferry. The empty
bus passed him on the hill, its thick purr gradually
diminishing as if it were slowly soaking into the golden
morning. He lifted his head to the silence. He was not
used to it, it made him feel as if he were on a height, a
shght, delicious giddiness between his eyes and the crown
of his head. The sunlight seeped into him, but it was
backed by a small cold breeze, the westerly that gave
the day its clear brilliance, so that he was conscious of
his body inside his clothes, oddly vulnerable, and of him-
self as a dark stroke on the flawless autumn day. It was
his body and not his mind that felt selfconscious, and he
remembered that it was always like that when he returned.
He had woken up that morning loathing everything. He
had been repelled by yesterday's staleness, yesterday's
cigarette butts and stacked washing up, the longstanding
frowsiness of a man living alone in poverty, with which
he had been shut up all night. The half-written story
too, which was giving him so much trouble, himg Uke a
murk in the room. His mind had shut against it in a
nervous despair with which he was all too familiar. His
loathing had been like a bad taste in his mouth. He had
been glad to step out of it and turn the key upon it.
That was why he was earlier than usual, that and because
he hated to be expected, to see his mother waiting for
him at the gate in her apron.

Now he came on the house unawares. He stood and
stared for a moment at the cottage before he went in,
fingering again his conscious detachment hke a coin in
his pocket. There was the picket fence, the two pine
trees that ate all the good out of the soil, and covered

SUNDAY 107

the thin grass with brown needles, the wide gateless side
entrance, dusty and rutted with the passage of the vans,
the peehng board above it with the words "RemovaUst"
and " General Carrier " scarcely distinguishable, the
stables, his father's boxhke office of unpainted wood, the
bare paddock beyond where the horses were spelled ;
on the other side of the house, the private side, the garden,
heavy headed dahlias, chrysanthemums rank smelling,
the cassia bush a blob of bright yellow, a thich ball of
flowers, little paths edged with glazed tiles and beds
bordered with fleshy rosettes of " cups-and-saucers."
The cottage was wide, low, drab and of weatherboard,
the windows shut, the steps whitened almost startlingly
in the general drabness. It looked quiet, uninhabited.
John knew it was readied up, waiting as ever for some-
thing that never happened, waiting for a funeral perhaps,
for nothing less would be allowed to disturb it. That or
Connie's wedding. A funeral was inevitable some day,
Connie's wedding wasn't. All the life was at the back of
the house. He went round the house on the stable side
because he did not want to meet his father.

He went up the two steps into the big old-fashioned
kitchen. His mother was at the sink with the tap turned
on, washing the vegetables, and did not hear him, but
she felt his shadow darken the door. She turned.

" Why, Jackie, you startled me." She dried her hands
hastily on her apron as he kissed her. " And I wasn't
at the gate to meet you," she added self-reproachfully.
" You're early, love." Her voice was as flat as the felt
slippers she wore to ease her bunions, but her worn hands
trembled a little as she put them on her son's shoulders.

" How are you, Mum ?"

" I'm all right, son."

108 THE PERSIMMON TREE

She didn't ask any questions, but she looked them,
searching him with her eyes. She knew that she must
make the most of this moment when she had him to her-
self. He rubbed his cheek against her's to escape her
eyes. He knew that she forgave him because his cuffs
were frayed and his tie worn to a string, but it irked
him that she should forgive him when there was nothing
to forgive. I forgive you, my son, for living your own
life, because I see it is a failure and that you are suffering
for it. I forgive you for being my mother and for loving
me. I love you.

It was over. Connie came in. " Hullo, Jack." She had
washed her hair and had been drying it in the srni, a
bath towel round her shoulders. He kissed her. The
sewing machine stopped in the box room off the kitchen,
and Izzie came in. " Hullo, Jack. I thought I heard
you." Izzie was tall with faded, untidy, red hair. She had
come years ago when the children were small, a child
herself, as " mother's help " and now was an indissoluble
part of the family. John kissed her too.

" I'll make the tea," said the mother, lifting the lid
of the range and setting the black iron kettle down on
the bright fire. " Your father's on the side verandah."

He went out into the sun again with Connie, while
Izzie set out the cups.

They walked in silence between the dahlias. Connie
pressed back the damp hair from her high bumpy fore-
head. She didn't care how she looked, but why should
she ? He was her brother. You would hardly think she
was two years younger than he, a woman still in her
twenties. It was this that aroused his affection. He
wanted to make contact with her. Why shouldn't they
be frank with one another ?

" How are things ?" he asked.

SUNDAY 109

" Same as usual."

" School ?"

" Oh, school — different every day and always the same."
A dark discontent settled on her face.

" Why don't you cut out of it ?"

" What's the good ? Anything else would be the same."

That sounded like a dead end, but he was really think-
ing about himself.

" You and I are alike, Connie, only I've got free and
you haven't."

" Have you ?" she asked dryly, looking him up and
down.

" Is that how you measure everything ?" he asked,
nettled.

She laughed, and tried to pull his arm through hers.
It was Connie's way to be disagreable first, and friendly
afterwards, when it was too late. The thought of defen-
ding his position exhausted him. He would never make
her understand that being a failure his own way was a
sort of freedom, that he might be making a poor showing
now, but that he was slowly gathering himself for some-
thing else, that what he needed was nothingness, a rest
from importunities. He had shaken off the importunities
of his home, the loving kindness of his mother, which he
could not resist, the dominence of his father, the per-
petual insistance of his father's will that he, for some
complex reason, in which perhaps being the eldest child
had its part, could not resist at short range either. He
had taken on other importunities that humbled and
interrupted him, but did not penetrate his spirit in the
same way. Creation could still come to him. He was
free, at least, in whatever poverty and distress, to give
his mind to that long brooding, when it hung like a drop
over a precipice ready to fall. How could he say that to

no THE PERSIMMON TREE

any human being, least of all to Connie ? She didn't
know that there was a difference between success in the
carrying trade, and success in writing. He might just as
well offer his father a mystic experience as a reason for
not going into the family business. He wasn't, he told
himself glancing at his sister, waterproof like Connie.
She could go into herself and shut the door. She didn't
need a desert and a cell. She would never do anything
so jejune as to rebel — jejune was the word she would use
— because her conception of the trap was so much more
complete than his. No futile childish rebellion could
liberate her. They gave up the discussion now with
nothing said. All family conversation, it seemed, was of
this stunted growth.

" Hadn't you better go and see father ?" she asked
with a trace of malice.

John went round to the side verandah, where his father
sat on a deck chair in the sun, behind the knotted, leafless
screen of the wistaria, the Sunday paper strewed about
him, a large dominant old man with jutting brows and a
thick mouth. It was a shock to John each time he saw
his father, to realise that he was an old man, but the
impression, when they talked, always wore off again.
They met quite casually now. The old man was aware
that this was only a truce, this visit, a concession to
family feeling. He was ready to concede something to
family feeling even in the most strained circumstances.
Perhaps he concealed from himself that he no longer had
the impetus to quarrel with his son.

Presently the mother came out with the tea in breakfast
cups on a large papier mache tray. There were plates of
buttered scones and rock cakes. " Don't spoil your
dinner," she said tenderly, pressing John to eat.

SUNDAY HI

The old man went on reading his paper and she went
away but soon appeared again, the father's dressing
gown over her arm, and beckoned conspiratorially to
John. " Let me press your suit." Obediently he took the
dressing gown, and went into the room that used to be
his.

He stood beside the bed that had been made up.
Perhaps his mother had though he would stay, or it might
have been made for someone else. He longed to lay his
head upon the pillow. It was clean without spot or
blemish. He turned down a corner of the coverlet and,
thrust his hand, which looked very dark against their
whiteness, between the coarse, clean linen sheets. He
was swept by an agony of longing for peace and security
such as he had never known since he was born. The
burden of his manhood was intolerable. The linen, its
homeliness, its cleanness, made him aware of his mother,
of his loneliness, that he was forever a stranger to that
ragged edge of world where he lived, and to the rootless
and necessitious gaiety which was not gaiety, but a
fumbling after stimulation. He revolted against his
portion, contacts without background, the always shifting
pattern, long stimulation without climax, a world drained
to its patter. He stared at his dark hand, in the trance
to which a mind long forced, gives way. He let a pain
for which he had no name flow through him unimpeded,
in the widening hope, the belief of a child who has always
been protected, that it would work out its own solution,
that so much feeUng must be shaped to something.

He pulled off his coat, vest, trousers. If he did not go
out his mother would come in to look for him, and that
would be intolerable. The kitchen greeted him with a
sunny blast, and the warm aroma of dinner now far
advanced. His mother had the ironing board set up

112 THE PERSIMMON TREE

across the window, the iron heated. " Wouldn't you like
to go inside and sit down ?" she asked as if he were a
visitor. No, he liked the kitchen much better. He sat
down on the wooden kitchen chair.

The moment of crisis was over, gone like a wave.
\'aguely he missed it, felt himself comfortably rocked in
the weakness of strain relaxed, about him the indulgence
of a convalescent. He looked out of the open door at the
shadow of a creeper on the worn bricks. That was good.
The delicate twining pattern satisfied him, the creeper
itself was indeterminate, the shadow completed and
perfect. He could not lift his mind away from it. His
mother ejaculated scraps of family news between thumps
of the iron. " Betty's expecting again," she said. Betty
was his brother's wife. He'd married her four months
before their first child was bom, but everyone had for-
gotten that now — except perhaps Vic. Already at twenty-
four he looked like a man who had worked hard, with a
puzzled, patient look about his forehead. That thought
bobbed past John's mind like a cork on water, and went
away. " She'll be able to use nearly all Bubby's things,
she kept them so nice."

Izzie moved from dresser to table, from table to oven.
She made a noise whatever she touched. She interjected
her comments into the conversation. Connie passed in
and out, calling out remarks over her shoulder. Steam
rose up from the wet cloth, as the mother pressed the
.suit. Every now and then she put the iron aside and
went to the range, shouldering Izzie away as if she were
jealous in the preparation of the dinner. John has seen
this muted, domestic hostility between them before. It
seemed part of the natural rightness of everything here.
He knew that he loved above all things the comfortable
shabbiness of his home. It wasn't the shabbiness of

SUNDAY 113

shoddy things gone while they were still new, but of old
friends who had worn a long time. Ever\'thing in the
kitchen, he saw now, was too big for the family — the big
boilers on the stove, the black iron kettles, the copper
saucepans. Even the dinner plates -with their uglv
brown pattern and criss-cross of tiny cracks were an
out size. He had never known any others. They comforted
him. He didn't hsten to what anyone said.

There were steps on the path outside. " That'U be
Gwennie," said his mother.- He might have known
she'd have Gwen here.

Gwen came in with an armful of tight j^ellow chrysan-
themums. She looked just the same as when she left
school ten years ago. She had a littie snub nose, gentie
and confiding, with a scatter of freckles across it, and
tight curled hair that looked as if it would crackle mider
the hand. She wore a blue serge dress with a velvet
collar.

" Hullo, Gwen," he said, and got up and kissed her. It
was as if he had kissed the chrysanthemums, for he got
no impression but of their pungency.

" Oh, Jack," she said in her Uttle breathless voice.

" I brought you some chrysanths," she said kissing
his mother.

He saw how well they understood one another. It
was obvious to him that Gwen, backed up by his mother,
was waiting for him, till in some mysterious wa^", he
"came^ound." He suspected that the old lady even
hoped he might get into a scrape with her Uke Vic had,
and have to marry her. Better that way than not at all.
It would be aU for the best. He'd be roped down then,
settled.

Dinner was read}', served out on the kitchen table.

114 THE PERSIMMON TREE

" Call your father, Connie."

The old man came in, sat down at table and took up
his knife and fork. His plate was put in front of him,
and he began to eat at once. John's plate was filled
with food. His mother had given him the choicest of
eveniiiing. Connie looked at it and tittCTed " The Pro-
digal Son," she said. There was an awkward pause.
The old man looked angrily from side to side imder his
heavy bro\vs which, ^Tith his lowered head, gave him
the appearance of a bull swinging its head in wrath.

■ I've told Vic. to come along, but he said he couldn't.
I think he nMght have done." said the mother com-
plainingly.

TTie four women kept jumping up, the two men sat
still to be waited on. Conversation was desultory, every-
one took refuge in eating. At first John was hungry
but he was quickly satisfied. Yet the mountain on his
plate seemed hardly to decrease. His mother watched
his plate. " Is 3'our potato all right, dear ?" she asked
and when she saw him flawing, " You must eat, son."
Her solicitude hung over him Uke an overwhelming
bosom. He knew that this dinner, this opportunity- to
feed him, was the crux of the whole situation for her,
that she had been looking forward to it for weeks, that
eveiA" mouthful he took gave her pleasure. He struggled
on. It seemed as if he were not eating with his mouth
oidy, but absorbing food out of the laden air with his
whole body. The monstrous dishes bulged at him. Used
he to eat like this ? His stomach must have got pinched
lately. He got through the mountain somehow.

" I don't think I could manage any pudding. Mum,"
he said apologetically.

" Off your pecker ?" asked his father, staring at him.
" You wouldn't be any good in the canning business."

SUNDAY 115

His mother's face crinkled as if she were going to cry.
Gwen stood on the other side of him, waiting, sohcitious,
sad. Connie stared at him with bright, mahcious eyes.

" It's date pudding," his mother pleaded. "Your
favourite pudding."

He owed her this even if only for that tranquil time
in the kitchen. He wasn't going to do any of the other
things she wanted, not marry Gwen, or seduce her, or
come back home or give up any of his oddness. He'd
have to do this for her. It was absurd, but it was real.
He'd gone beyond her reach and she knew it. It was a
cruel, open secret. All she could do for him now was mend
his clothes and feed him when the opportunity offered.
This was what her stored love had been waiting for.

" Oh, well, if it's DATE pudding. . . . I'll have some
of that."

She brought him a big wedge. It had been boiled in a
cloth, and had a damp, pale, outer rim. Yellow custard
flowed round it. It was stiff with sweetness. It was like
eating a pincushion.

" Gee, it's good," he said. A faint, pleased flush rose
on his mother's cheek bones.

" Vic. ought to have come," she said. " Betty, don't
feed him like this. Vic's, almost as fond of date pudding
as you are. Have a little more, son, there's plenty out-
side."

" No," he said firmly, " that would spoil it. What
you gave me was just right."

" Now you lay down while we wash up," said his
mother tenderly.

He was glad to. He lay on the hard couch in the
drawing room because the one in the dining room was
sacred to his father. He was aware of the absurdity of
it. The two men lying down getting over their immense

116 THE PERSIMMON TREE

meals. It wouldn't be absurd to his father, only natural.
He fell into a warm, sickly, half doze. Presently Gwen
\^ as sent in to entertain him. She chattered on and on,
he could not even listen. His skin felt course and yeUow,
his mind leaden. The hours were like smooth, water-worn
stones.

It was five o'clock. Down in the wooden office the
telephone shrilled and shrilled. It was Gwen who went
down to answer it, but only after they had argued as to
whether it ought to be answered at all. She came back
waving her arms. " It's for Jack," she called in the
breathless voice that irritated him.

He hunched over the phone with a furtive air. The
phone in the office always gave him that guilty feeling.
It was a girl's voice with a shght nag in it. He stopped
its flow.

" That'll be great. Coral. Of course jou can count on
me." He could not keep the rehef out of his voice.

" Soimds as if I were rescuing you from the wilds of
the family bosom."

He laughed to evade answering her, hating himself.

" I'll be with you in an hour."

" I can't promise you an}d:hing but a sardine and a
biscuit."

He went back to the house. They raised enquiring
faces.

" I've got to go back to town straight away." He
didn't want to go, but, well, yes, it was a party of sorts,
but he was going to see an editor there, a man who could
help him. The words were dr^- in his mouth, he could
hardly get them out.

His mother wailed, " I had such a nice tea for you."

" It's rotten luck," he mumbled. His one thought
was to get away.

SUNDAY 117

" I think you are hateful. Poor mother," said Connie
in a low voice. There was no longer malice in her eyes,
but contempt. The mother did not hear, she had gone
out to the kitchen. John did not answer. What was the
use when he would be gone in a few minutes ?

His mother came back with a cardboard box. She
acquiesced in his going with the heavy resignation that
she always showed her menfolk.

" I've put you up some things," she said. " Some
tarts and cakes."

He took the box, distressed and wretched. He couldn't
arrive at Coral's flat with the thing. He'd have to dump
it somewhere. He kissed each of the women. Gwen's
mouth flowered up softly under his. He felt himself
caught in a web, silken, clinging. He put her aside
roughly. The next moment he was running downhill
towards the ferry, towards freedom, his shoulders hunched
up, shabby, ungainly.

118 THE PERSIMMON TREE

THE NEW DRESS

The first thing Mavis saw' when she woke was the new
dress hanging from the disused gas bracket. Her heart
turned over with joy and she jumped out of bed to make
sure that it was a fine day. By leaning out of the window
and twisting her neck she could see a strip of sky, now the
cool, bloomy blue of early morning. The air itself seemed
conscious of a holiday and the very garbage tins in the
lane below looked as if they were grouped for a still life.
It was half past five, so there was still a long time to wait
before she could put on the dress and go out to meet
Lennie. Four hours, half a working day. She couldn't
possibly sleep any more. All night she had slept lightly
because she missed the anodyne of fatigue to which in
the last two years her body had become accustomed.
To go to bed not tired was from habit unsatisfactory.
Without a weight against it the door of sleep kept flying
open.

Even the milkman hadn't been, so she couldn't have
a cup of tea. She sat on the bed, her chin on her drawn
up knees, looking, in the skimpy cotton nightdress,
much less than seventeen. The dress drew her thoughts
like a magnet. It really was lovely, the loveliest, the first
lovely thing, that she had had. Her glance caressed the
full skirt, the shirred waist, the little close fitting bodice
with its fischue collar, the bow of peach coloured velvet
with long ends falling almost to the hem. But the colour
was best of all. The printed silk showed a bright, rich
confusion, damson coloured ovals slid over a background
of peach with touches of rose and leaf green, and flecks
of black, which gave the whole thing character. You

THE NEW DRESS 119

wouldn't know it was only vegetable silk unless you were
an expert. It was almost too good. She wouldn't mind
just keeping it here and gloating over it.

Pa5dng for the dress had been rather a struggle. She
had made the first payment with the ten shillings Gran
had sent her for her birthday. Then every week it had
taken its toll. The money had had to come out some-
where, but she had never flinched. It was the waiting,
not the scraping, that had gone hard with her. On
Friday, rushing out in the tea break — they didn't get
paid till the afternoon — she had triumphantly paid the
last two instalments and got the frock out of the lay-by.
This left her, after she had paid her rent and allowed
enough for fares, the milkman and the baker, exactly
one and eightpence. It was now only five days to pay
day, and Lennie was paying everything today. That
made four days. But over the head of the girl alone there
always hangs the sword of emergencies.

Still she had the dress. That was everything. It had
been crucial to have it for this week-end. She was going
out for the day with Lennie, and then he was taking her
home to have tea with his Auntie. Lennie had suggested
this before, but Mavis had always found some excuse.
Lennie, who like herself, had lost his parents, lived with
his Auntie. She was a widow and owned the cottage
they lived in. In Mavis's eyes such stability spelt wealth
and the determination not to show herself before critical
eyes until she could do Lennie credit was sunk like a
caisson into her obstinate little heart. No dress, no Auntie.
This, even though she knew that when a boy took his
girl home it was almost as good as an understanding.
And an understanding didn't fall far short of an engage-
ment, which was, in Mavis's circle, the very pinnacle of
achievement. Marriage itself was generally a retreat

120 THE PERSIMMON TREE

from glory into the struggle to make ends meet and bring
up children on the hire purchase system.

The dress wasn't, except secondarily, for Lennie.
Mavis knew that Lennie 'liked' her and that was quite
enough for the present. Lennie was nice. He was a clerk
in a city office. They had met at the roller skating and
had taken a fancy to one another in the first five minutes.

Mavis worked at the perfumery counter in the bargain
basement of a chain store. She liked it quite well though
there were disadvantages like standing all day and not
getting enough air to breathe. She thought the perfumery
the best counter to be at, because most of the customers
were girls like herself, hunting for a rainbow in the
jungle.

She got on well with the other girls. There were two
others in her sub-section, Gladys who was twenty and a
ball of style, and Molly, fat, with a bad complexion
and an all enveloping family hfe. Gladys was the leader.
She knew the world.

Gladys approved of the dress, when Ma\ds took it
out of its tissue paper in the dressing room on Friday
night to exhibit it. She tried it against her own black
curls and apricot skin mth approbation, and she em-
bellished the occasion with a lecture. "Don't let him
put one over you, kiddy. You're just the soft sort they
try it on." Someone had put it over Gladys a couple
of years before and having come out on the other side
she now felt that she knew all she needed to know about
life. Mavis said no, she wouldn't, and wanted to get the
dress back into its wrappings. It wasn't that sort of dress.
It was for herself. It wasn't a lure, it was a protection.
But she couldn't have said that any more than they
could have understood it. It was a blind impulse dis-
solved in emotion.

THK NEW DRESS 121

Now it was time to dress, now it was time to go. But
the waiting for this long desired moment had been too
long, too empty. It had left its trace, a blank, flat spot
in the happy excitement of her mind.

The day was fine but heavy with heat, the sky of a
hazy blue that might turn to cloud, the light itself seemed
pigmented and fell on white walls with a coppery hue.
The city had a deserted, holiday look and already at
ten o'clock there were papers and other debris drifting
in the streets. Mavis and Lennie were going to Bobbin
Head. It meant first a train and then a bus. In the
electric train it was too noisy to talk but they smiled at
one another a lot. Everything was lovely except that
Lennie hadn't responded spontaneously to the new dress.
It was only in answer to a leading question that he said
it was very nice. They had what was to be the best
moment of the day in the crowded bus going out to the
picnic grounds. Pressed together in the crush they
looked at one another from a range of a few inches. They
felt intimate and alone. Mavis was sweet. Lennie was
nice. They shared a spurt of happiness.

They had lunch as soon as they arrived, although it
was early, because they were hungry. Auntie had pre-
pared it for them — egg sandwiches, sausage rolls, fruit
and cake, with tea — tasting persistently of ink — in a
battered thermos.

Afterwards, Lennie suggested that they should go out
in a boat on the river but Mavis refused and he could
not persuade her. She wasn't going to risk the new dress
in a boat. This was a blow to Lennie, because as he had
planned the day over and over in his mind, and the boat
was an essential part. It would be cool on the water.
They could row for a bit, and then drift. They'd get out
of the crowd. He put it to Mavis all over again, but she

122 THE PERSIMMON TREE

shook her head obstinately. What would they do ?
They couldn't sit here with children playing ball all over
them. Would she come for a walk ? Lennie knew that
he wasn't being very pleasant about the change in his
plans. He wanted to be magnaminous but he did feel
sore.

" I don't want to get hot," said Mavis primly.

They started to walk towards the bushy slopes at the
far side of the picnic ground, doggedly through the
broiling midday sun, a couple of yards apart. The new
dress WcLs spoiling everything, Lennie thought sullenly.
He thought it was hideous an5rway, bright and ugly. It
made Mavis look just like other girls, and she wasn't.
And, worst of all, she'd put on. a new manner with it.
He was damned if he liked playing second fiddle to a
bit of rag.

It wasn't much cooler in the bush, the trees cast Uttle
shade, the earth was parched and dusty. They walked
on and on rather dolefully, looking for a place to sit.
Whenever Lennie suggested a place Mavis said it was
too sunny or too dusty. She was aware of dark moons
of moisture staining the silk under her arms. She lad-
dered her stocking on some prickly undergrowth, and
was ready to cry. Then Lennie found quite a nice place
down near the river with a fallen log in the shade. He
spread his handkerchief on the ground and Mavis con-
sented to sit on it, her back to the log. He sat beside her
and tried to put his arm around her, but it was too hot
and awkward. He took her Uttle fist in his hand, tried to
untwine the fingers, but when he felt her resistance he
put it back in her lap. The dry earth ticked with little
unseen insects. There was no other sound. The picnic
ground was as far away as the sky.

THE NEW DRESS 123

They talked in a desultory way and presently Lennie
lay down and put his head in her lap. She Hked that.
She pressed her fingers over his eyes and he smiled at her
with his lips. This was better. The situation was knitting
together. Lennie was content. If the chaps at the office
could see him now they'd probably think him a terrible
sissy. This wasn't their idea of spending a holiday, he
could bet. They were rocked together in the cradle of
the warm afternoon. They grew drowsy and did not re-
sist. Soon they were asleep.

It may have been the thunder that woke them or the
first drops of rain splashing on their faces. They woke
simultaneously to a stormy light and a swish of advan-
cing wind.

" We'd better get," said Lennie, jumping up and pulling
Mavis after him by the hand. As they picked up their
hats and the old suitcase they grinned rather sheepishly
at each other. The joke was on them falling asleep like
that, but they didn't mean to tell anyone.

They had nearly reached the edge of the bush before
the rain caught them up. The trees offered little shelter,
it was no good staying there to get wet. As they bolted
across the open for the picnic sheds, it came down in a
deluge. Every shelter was crowded already with boys
and girls and family parties, but the nearest group made
room cheerfully for Lennie and Mavis. Everyone was in
crazy spirits and the rain had broken down all the taboos.
The many separate picnics had become one large party.
Stragglers were greeted with cheers, facetious advice
and brdad innuendoes. The wags were busy. Presently
someone began to sing a popular song and the contagion
spread from island to island, community singing in the
rain. Lennie sang loudly, his arm round Mavis's shoul-
ders, swinging her to the rhythm. Mavis was silent. She

124 THE PERSIMMON TREE

was wondering miserably what the rain had done to her
dress. This worry made her feel very lonely. She twisted
this way and that but could see nothing, they were all
packed so tightly. She could only feel it, sodden against
her legs.

It was not until they reached the railway station that
she was able to assess the damage. The colours had run
badly, and the skirt as it dried was shrinking. It was
above her knees. It looked ridiculous and awful. It
would never be the same. She looked at Lennie, her
face hard with tragedy. He didn't know what to say in
this purely feminine dilemma.

" It'll be all right when it's dry," he mumbled. She
turned away. " Auntie'll iron it for you." As if that
would be any good.

The train drew up and he bustled her in to get seats.

" I'm not going," she thrust at him as the train started.

" What ?"

" I'm not going."

" Not going where ?" he asked stupidly.

" To your Auntie's. I can't now."

He stared at her incredulously. " Why not ?"

" I couldn't possibly, looking Hke this."

" You look all right. Don't be a chump."

"I'm not going."

He knew that she meant it. He thought glumly of
how he had dragooned his good natured, slatternly aunt
into sprucing up the house, and of the tea she had pro-
mised to prepare, for them.

" You can't let me down like this."

She shot him a glance that seemed to put all the blame
on him. It couldn't only be the dress, she had been
difficult all day.

THE NEW DRESS 125

He put his mouth to her ear in the ratthng train.

" Did I do anything to upset you, Mavis ?"

" No."

" Are you angry with me ?"

She shook her head wearily. Why couldn't he leave
her alone ?

" Look here," he said, " your beastly dress has spoiled
our day. You were crazy to wear it to a picnic anyway.
It serves you right."

At her look of anguish his anger died. He tried to put
his arm round her. " Come home with me, lovie. Auntie
and I have got everything so nice for you."

He didn't understand. The fiction supplements always
said that men didn't understand, and it was quite true.
It was no good offering her love in place of a spoiled
dress.

She slumped down in her corner as far from him as
she could get, and he sat looking out of the window, his
face set, feeling more confused than angry. He'd never
get the hang of Mavis. Girls were queer.

The week stretched miserably before Mavis. Four
fourpenny lunches, a penny for the gas, and threepence
for everything else. She wouldn't be able to go out, and
Lennie wasn't likely to take her after this. Perhaps
she'd never see him again. She'd put the dress between
them and it had become a mountain. She wanted to
say to him out of the new wisdom that was beginning
to grow in her heart : " It has got to be like this now,
but it will be all right soon. Be patient, Lennie, I'm
not ready for you yet, but it won't be long now."

A few minutes later they parted in what looked like
offended silence, but was only the natural confusion of
their young hearts.

126 THE PERSIMMON TREE

HABIT

Miss Jessie Biden was singing in a high plangent voice
as she made the beds. It was a form of self-expression
she allowed herself only when there were no guests in
the house, and she mingled the hjnnns and sentimental
songs of her girlhood with a fine impartiality. She made
the beds with precision, drawing the much washed mar-
cella quilts, with spikey fringes, up over the pillows so
that the black iron bedsteads had an air of humihty and
self-respect. The sheets, though not fine, smelt amiably
of grass, and the blankets were honest, if a little hard
with much laundering. With the mosquito nets hanging
from a hoop which in its turn, was suspended from a
cup hook screwed into the wooden ceiling, the beds looked
like virtuous but homely brides.

Jessie stopped singing for a minute as she pulled the
green hoUand blind to the exact middle of the window,
and surveyed the room to see if aU were in order. She
had very strict notions about the exact degree of cir-
cumspection to which paying guests were entitled.
Yesterday everything washable in the rooms had been
washed, the floor, the woodwork, the heavy florid china
on the rather frail, varnished wooden washstands. The
rooms smelled of soap, linoleum poUsh and wood. The
lace curtains were stiff with starch. Indeed, there was
more starch than curtain, and without it they would
have been draggled and pitiful wisps.

As every door in the house was open and it was a light
wooden shell of a place, old as Australian houses go and
dried by many summers, Jessie could quite comfortably
talk to Catherine, who was cooking in the kitchen from
wherever she happened to be working. But presently

HABIT 127

the rooms finished, she came to stand in the kitchen
doorway with a Hst of the guests they were expecting
for Easter, in her hand.

The kitchen was a pleasant room looking on to the
old orchard, a row of persimmon trees heavy with pointed
fruit turning golden in the early autumn, squat, round,
guava bushes, their plump, red-coronetted fruit hidden
in their glossy dark leaves, several plum and peach trees,
one old wide-spreading apple tree and a breakwind of
loquats and quinces. Beyond again was the bush, blue-
green, shimmering a little in the morning sunshine.

Catherine Biden, too, was pleasant, and in keeping
with the warm autumn landscape. Her red-gold hair,
fine, heavy and straight, made a big bun on her plump
white neck, her milky skin was impervious to the sun
and her arms, on which her blue print sleeves were rolled
up, were really beautiful. In the parlance of the neigh-
bours, neither of the sisters would see forty again, which
somehow sounded duller and more depressing than to say
that Catherine was forty-two and Jessie forty-six.

" I'm putting the Adamses in the best room," Jessie
was saying, " because they don't mind sharing a bed.
And Miss Dickens and her friend in the room with the
chest of drawers. Mrs. Holies says she must have a room
to herself, so it will have to be the httle one. The
Thompsons and Miss George'll sleep on the verandah
and dress together in the other room. The old lady and
her niece next the dining room. That leaves only the
verandah room this side, for Mr. Campbell."

" It's quite all right while the weather is cool," said
Catherine, in her placid way, rolling dough.

Jessie looked at her list with disfavour. "We know
everyone but Mr. Campbell. It's rather awkward having
just one man and so many women."

128 THE PERSIMMON TREE

" Perhaps he'll like it," Catherine suggested.

" I don't think so. His name's Angus. He's probably
a man's man."

" Oh, if he's as Scotch as all that he won't mind. He'll
fish all the time."

" Well, all I hope is he doesn't take fright and leave us
with an empty room." The Easter season was so short,
they couldn't afford an empty room.

" I hope," said Catherine, " we don't get a name for
having only women. We do get more teach^ers every
year and fewer men, don't we ?"

" Yes, we do. I think we'd better word the adver-
tisement differently."

She sighed. Jessie, growing stout, with high cheek
bones and a red skin, was the romantic one. She had
always taken more kindly to this boarding house business
than Catherine, because of its infinite possibUites — ^new
people, new chances of excitement and romance. Al-
though perhaps she no longer thought of romance, the
habit of expecting something to happen remained with
her.

Their father had married late. This house beside the
lagoon had come to him with his wife and he had spent
his long retirement in it, ministered to b}- his daughters.
\\'hen he and his pension had died together, he had not,
somehow, been able to leave them anything but the house,
the small orchard and the lovely raggedy slope of \vild
garden rimning down to the water. Jessie, in a mood of
tragic daring, advertised accommodation for holiday
guests, carefully coppng other advertisements she found
in the paper. This expedient would, they hoped, tide
them over. That was twelve years ago. A makeshift
had become a permanency. In time, with the instrumen-
tahty of the local carpenter, they had added a couple of

HABIT 129

rooms and put up some almost paper-thin partitions. It
looked as if they had developed the thing as far as they
could.

They both still looked on their home as something
different from their guest house. It was vested in that
company of lares and penates now in bondage to mammon,
but some day to be released. " Our good things," the
sisters called them, the original furniture of the house,
the bits and pieces that their mother had cherished. The
big brass bed that had been their parents' was still in the
best bedroom, though the cedar chest of drawers with
pearl buttons sunk in its knobs and the marble topped
washstand had gone to raise the tone of other rooms.
The dining room was very much as it had always been.
The sideboard with the mirrors and carved doors took up
the best part of one wall, and set out on it was the old
lady's brightly polished but now unused silver coffee
service. The harmonium, with its faded puce silk, filled
an inconvenient amount of room by the window. The
old people's enlarged portraits, an ancient, elaborate
worktable with dozens of little compartments, and other
intimate treasures not meant for paying guests, but
impossible to move out of their way, gave the room a
genteel but overcrowded appearance. In the dining room
in the off season it was almost as if nothing had ever
happened.

In twelve years Jessie's hopefulness had worn a little
thin and Catherine's gentle placid nature had become
streaked with discontent, as marble is veined with black.
Sometinles she asked herself where it was aU leading,
what would happen to them by and by and if this was
all life had in store ? She began in a slow blind way to
feel cheated, and to realise how meaningless was the
pattern of the years with their alternations of rush and

El

130 THE PERSIMMON TREE

Stagnation, of too much work and too little money. Of
their darker pre-occupations the sisters did not speak to
one another. In self defence they looked back rather
than forward.

The guests began to arrive at lunch time. Angus Camp-
bell was the last to come, by the late train, long after
dark. Catherine went up to the bus stop with a lantern
to meet him. He saw her for the first time with the
light thrown upward on her broad fair face, and He
thought how kind and simple and good she looked. His
tired heart hfted, and he felt reassured.

Undressing in the small stuffy room they shared,
next to the kitchen, Jessie asked her sister, " Do you
think he'll fit in all right ?"

" I think so," Catherine answered. "He seems a nice,
quiet man."

" Young ?" asked Jessie with the last flicker of interest
in her tired body.

" About our age."

" Oh well . . . ."

They kissed one another good-night as they had every
night since they were children, and lay down side by
side to sleep.

The shell of a house was packed with sleeping people,
all known and all strangers.

Angus Campbell evidently did not find his position of
solitary man very trying, for on Easter Monday he asked,
rather diffidently, if he might stay another week. He
was taking his annual holidays. When the other guests
departed, he remained. One week grew into two, then
he had to return to Sydney.

He was a tall, gaunt, slightly stooped man with a
weather-beaten complexion — the kind of Scots com-

HABIT 131

plexion that manages to look weather beaten even in a
city office — and a pair of clear, understanding, friendly,
hazel eyes. His manner was very quiet cind at first he
seemed rather a negligible and uninteresting man. But
presently you discovered in him a steadfast quality that
was very likeable. You missed him when he went away.

When he was alone with the sisters, life settled in-
evitably into a more intimate rhythm. They ate their
meals together on a rickety table on the verandah, where
they could look over the garden to the lagoon. He
would not let the sisters chop wood or do the heavy
outdoor work that they were accustomed to, and he even
came into the kitchen and helped Jessie wash up while
Catherine put away. He did it so simply and naturedly
that it seemed right and natural to them.

One day he began digging in the garden, and, from
taking up the potatoes they wanted, went on to other
things. " You oughtn't to be doing this," Jessie said.
" It's your hoUday."

" You don't know how I enjoy it," he answered, and
his eyes, travelling over the upturned loamy earth to the
blazing persimmon trees and the bush beyond, had in
them a look of love and longing. She knew that he
spoke the truth.

He went out fishing and brought back strings of fish
for their supper with pride and gusto, and then had to
watch Catherine cook them. There seemed to be some-
thing special about Catherine cooking the fish he caught.

He helped Catherine pick fruit for jam and she was
aware that for all he was thin and stooped he was much
stronger than she, and it gave her a curious, pleased
feeling. Jessie, alone in the house, could hear their voices
in the orchard, a httle rarefied and idealised, in the still
warm air.

132 THE PERSIMMON TREE

One day it rained, great gusts of tbick fine rain that
blotted out the lagoon, and Angus, kept in, took his
book on to the verandah. Passing to and fro doing the
work, Cartherine saw that he was not reading, but looking
out into the rain. Then he went and stood by the verandah
rail for a long time. She came and stood beside him.

He said, " If you listen you can just hear the rain on
the grass and among the leaves — ^and smell the earth.
It's good, isn't it ? The trees are more beautiful looming
through the mist — ^the shape of them." Marvelling, she
saw that he was half in love with the beauty that she
had lived with all her life.

A magpie flew through the rain, calling. He laid his
hand on her shoulder and she was a httle shaken by that
warm and friendly touch. The eyes he turned on her
still held the reflection of a mystery she had not seen.

Angus Campbell told them about himself. He was a
clerk in a secure job and for years he had looked after
his invahd mother, coming home from the office to sit
with her, getting up in the night to tend her, his money
going in doctor's biUs. She had often been querulous
and exacting. " The pain and the tedium were so hard
for her to bear, and there was so little I could do for her.
Of course I remember her ver\- different No one could
have had a better mother. She was ver\" ambitious for
me, and made great sacrifices when I was a boy, so that
I shoiild have a good education and get on. But I never
did — ^not ver^" far." It was e^idoit that he thought he
owed her something for that disappointment. Two months
ago she had died and he missed her bitterh-. ' She had
become my child." he said. He felt, too, the cruelt]k- of
her hfe that had been hard and unsatisfied, and had ended
in pain. Now there was no hope of ever retrie\-ine it.

HABIT 133

" He is very good," said Jessie to her sister when
they were alone that night.

" And kind," said Catherine. " The kindest man I've
ever known."

Neither of them thought how few men they'd known.

Jessie raised herself on her elbow to look at Catherine
as she slept in the faint moonUght, and thought how
comely she was, sweet and wholesome.

When Angus had, at last, to go, he said he would be
back for the week-end. They kissed him. He was to
arrive on the Friday by the late train again, and Catherine
prepared supper for him before the fire, for it was getting
cold now. She took the silver coffee pot, the sacred
silver coffee pot that had been their mother's, and put
it to warm above the kitchen stove. She cast a half
defiant glance at Jessie as she did so, but Jessie went and
took the silver sugar bowl too, and the cream jug, filled
them, and set them on the table.

Angus asked Catherine to go out in the boat with him
or to go walking, and then he paid Jessie some little
attention. But they both knew. One Simday, perhaps
it was the fourth week-end he had come, the autumn
was now far advanced, he and Catherine went for a long
walk and he asked her to marry him. He took her in
his arms and kissed her. She felt very strange, for she
had never been kissed before, not by a man who was
in love with her. They walked home hand in hand as if
they were still very young, and when Catherine saw
Jessie waving to them from the verandah she stood still
and the unaccountable tears began to flow down her
cheeks.

They said, everybody said, that there was no reason
why they should wait, meaning they had better hurry
up. The wedding was fixed for three months ahead.

134 THE PERSIMMON TREE

It was a curious three months for Catherine. When
Angus came for the week-end they would not let him
pay his board, and that made a little awkwardness.
Even calling him Angus seemed a trifle strange. He did
not come every week-end now. Once he said, " It seems
wrong to take you away from all this beauty and freedom
and shut you up in a little suburban house among a lot
of other little houses just the same. Do you think
you'll fret, my darling ?"

Catherine had never thought very much about the
beauties of nature. So she just shook her head where it
rested against his shoulder. Still, her heart sank a little
when she saw his house with its small windows, dark
stuff hangings and many souvenirs of the late Mrs. Camp-
bell. It seemed as if sickness and death had not yet been
exorcised from it.

Catherine and Jessie sewed the trousseau. "We must
be sensible," they said to one another, and bought good
stout cambric and flannelettes, though each secretly
hankered after the pretty and the foolish. Catherine could
not quite forget that she was going to be a middle aged
bride, and that that was just a little ridiculous. Neigh-
bours, meaning to be kind, teased her about her wedding
and were coy, sly and romantic in a heavy way, so that
she felt abashed.

A subtle difference had taken place in the relationship
of the sisters. Jessie felt a new tenderness for Catherine.
She was the younger sister who was going to be married.
Jessie's heart burned with love and protectiveness. She
longed, she didn't know why, to protect Catherine, to
do things for her. " Leave that to me," she would say
when she saw Catherine go to clean the stove or perform
some other dirty job. " You must take care of your
hands now."

HABIT 135

But Catherine always insisted on doing the roughest
work. " He's not marrying me for my beauty," she
laughed.

Catherine too thought more of her sister and of how
good and unselfish she was, and her little peculiarities
that once rather irritated her, now almost brought the
tears to her eyes. One night she broached what was
always on her mind.

" What will you do when I've gone ?" she asked in a
low voice.

" I'll get Ivy Thomas to help me in the busy times,"
Jessie answered in a matter of fact voice, " and in between,
I'll manage."

" But it will be lonely," said Catherine weakly.

Jessie cast a reproachful glance at her. "I'll manage,"
she said.

Catherine was no longer discontented and weighed
down with a sense of futility. Another emotion had taken
its place, something very like homesickness.

As she did her jobs about the place she thought now,
"It is for the last time," and there was a little pain
about her heart. She looked at her world with new eyes.
Angus's eyes perhaps. Going down to the fowlyard in
the early morning with the bucket of steaming bran and
pollard mash, she would look at the misty trees and the
water like blue silk under the milk-pale sky ; at the
burning autumn colours of the persimmon trees, and the
delicate frosty grass, and her heart would tremble with
its loveliness.

One evening, coming in with the last basket of plums
— ripe damsons with a thick blue bloom upon them —
she stopped to rest, her back to the stormy sunset, and
she saw thin, blue smoke like tulle winding among the
quiet trees where a neighbour was burning leaves. She

136 THE PERSIMMON TREE

thought that she would remember this all her life. Pick-
ing nasturtiums under the old apple tree she laid her
cheek for a moment against the rough silvery bark, and
closed her eyes. " My beloved old friend," she thought
but without words, " I am leaving you for a man I
scarcely know."

It would seem as if the exaltation of being loved, of
that one ripe and golden Sunday when she thought she
could love too, had become detached from its object and
centred now about her home. She even became aware
of a rhythm in her daily work. Objects were dear because
her hands were accustomed to them from childhood.
And now life had to be imagined without them.

" Wherever I am, I shall have to grow old," she
she thought, " and it would be better to grow old here
where everything is kind and open, than in a strange
place." It was as if the bogey she had feared, meaning-
less old age, had revealed itself a friend at the last
moment, too late.

Jessie lit the porcelain lamp with the green shade and
set it in the middle of the table among the litter of
the sewing. She stood adjusting the wick, her face in
shadow, and said :

" We'll have to have a serious talk about the silver
and things, Cathy. We'd better settle it to-night
before we get too busy."

" What about them ?" Catherine asked, biting off a
thread.

" You must have your share. We'll have to divide
them between us." Jessie's voice was quite steady and
her tone matter of fact.

" Oh, no," cried Catherine, with a sharp note of passion
in her voice, " I don't want to take anything away."

HABIT 137

" They are as much yours as mine."

" They belong here."

" They belong to both of us, and I'm not going to have
you go away empty handed."

" But, Jessie, I'll come back often. The house wouldn't
seem the same without mother's things. Don't talk as
if I were going away for ever."

" Of course you'll come back, but it won't be the same.
You'll have a house of your own."

" It won't be the same," echoed Catherine very low.

" I specially want you to have mother's rings. I've
always wanted you to wear them. You've got such pretty
hands and now you won't have to work so hard. . . .
and the pendant. Father gave that to mother for a
wedding present so as you're the one getting married it
is only fit you should wear it on your wedding day too.
I'll have the cameos. I'm sort of used to them. And the
cat's eye brooch that I always thought we ought to have
given Cousin Ella when mother died." Jessie drew a
rather difficult breath.

" You're robbing yourself," said Catherine, " giving
me all the best. You're the eldest daughter."

" That has nothing to do with it. We must think of
what is suitable. I think you ought to have the silver
coffee things. They've seemed specially yours since that
night — ^you remember — when Angus came. Perhaps they
helped . . . ."

Catherine made a funny little noise.

" I dgn't want the silver coffee set."

" Yes, you do. They're heeps too fine for guests.
They're good. What fair puzzles me is the work table.
You ought to have it because after all I suppose I'll be
keeping all the big furniture, but this room wouldn't
be the same without it."

138 THE PERSIMMON TREE

" No," cried Catherine. "Oh, Jessie, no. Not the work
table. I couldn't bear it." And she put her head down
among the white madapolam and began to cry, a wild,
desperate weeping.

" Cathy, darhng, what is it ? Hush, Petie, hush.
We'll do everything just as you want."

" I won't strip our home. I won't."

" No, darling, no, but you'll want some of your own
friendly things with you."

Jessie was crying a little too, but not wildly. " You're
overwrought and tired. I've let you do too much."
Her heart was painfully full of tenderness for her sister.

Catherine's sobs grew less at last, and she said in a
little gasping, exhausted voice. " I can't do it."

" I won't make you. It can stay here in its old place
and you can see it when you come on a visit."

" I mean I can't get marired and go away. It's harder
than anything is worth."

Jessie was agast. They argued long and confusedly.
Once Catherine said : " I wish it had been you, Jessie."

Jessie drew away. " You don't think that I . . . ."

" No, dear, only on general grounds. You'd have made
such a good wife and," with a painful little smile, " you
were always the romantic one."

" Not now," said Jessie staunchly.

" I'll write to Angus now, tonight," Catherine declared.

She wanted to be rid of this intolerable burden at once,
although Jessie begged her to sleep on it. Neither of them
had considered Angus, nor did they now. She got out
the bottle of ink, and the pen with the cherry wood
handle, which they shared, and began the letter. She^
was stiff and inarticulate on paper, and couldn't hope to
make him understand. It was a miserable, hopeless task
but she had to go through with it.

HABIT 139

While she bent over the letter, Jessie went out into
the kitchen and relit the fire. She took the silver coffee
pot, the sugar basin and the cream jug, and set them out
on the tray with the best worked traycloth. From the
cake tin she selected the fairest of the little cakes that
had been made for the afternoon tea of guests arriving
tomorrow. Stinting nothing, she prepared their supper.
When she heard Catherine sealing the letter, thumping
the flap down with her fist to make the cheap gum stick,
she carried in the tray.

Although she felt sick with crying, Catherine drank
her coffee and ate a cake. The sisters smiled at one
another with shaking lips and stiff redened eyelids.

" He won't come again now," said Jessie regretfully,
but each added in her heart, " He was a stranger, after
all."

140 THE PERSIMMON TREE

THE DRESSMAKER

Miss Simkins arrived early at the Bowker s to do her
day's sewing. She had to come earl}- because, of course,
everyone wanted their full eight hours, and liked her to
be well out of the way and the house tidied up before
their menfolk came home in the evening. It was just half-
past eight when she open the Bowker's gate, and there
was Mrs, Bowker waiting for her on the verandah. " \Miy.
Miss Simkins," she called, " I thought you had missed the
train. I've ever\'thing ready."

The kitchen table had been carried out on to the glassed-
in verandah, the machine was open, the work-basket
beside it. Mrs. Bowker made rather a merit of being
pimctual, and having everything ready. This stuck a
httle in Miss Simians' throat, because Mrs. Bowker
certainly profited by her punctuahty, in that it wrung
the maximum of labour out of Miss Simkins. Therefore
the merit, if any, weis hers and not Mrs. Bowkers". It
was Mrs. Bowker who received, and she who gave, and
yet Mrs. Bowker always said " I've everything ready
for j'ou," as if she had prepared a special treat.

Miss Simkins did not see verji- much of hfe but what
she saw she inspected very closely and she kept an exact
debit and credit account between herself and hfe. She
always observed her employers' conduct and utterences
minutely ^\ith a ^iew to keeping this statement up-to-
date. She was, she felt, one of hfe's principal creditors.

These thoughts were habitual, automatic, and, of course,
vmvoiced. She merely took off her hat, which collapsed
into immediate shapelessness, ga^-e two pokes to her
hair and sat down to the work-table. From her suitcase
she produced a sheaf of battered fashion journals.

THE DRESSMAKER 141

" Edna," called Mrs. Bowker. " Edna !" Her voice
shot up like a jack-in-the-box, surprisingly shrill for her
comfortable bulk. " You'd better get on with the school
tunic for Joyce, while Miss Bowker and I look at the
patterns," she said.

Edna Bowker came in, a tall, slight girl, with very red
hair and a very white skin, a very small mouth and very
large eyes. She had a lanquid air as if even her eyelashes
were a burden. (A young man had told her that she was
like a hesitation waltz, so she acquired the habit of
hesitating more and more even in the morning.)

" Good morning. Miss Simkins," she said politely.

A little warmth crept into the cold, glassy room. A
faint excitement beat up from the fashion books.
Miss Simkins cut boldly into the blue serge, making cold
metallic noises with the scissors, and putting pins in her
mouth. " It's all collars and sleeves this year," she
announced through them.

" I don't like them too exaggerated," said Mrs. Bowker.

" Miss Bowker has a long neck. She can stand it."

" She's got the fashionable figure. I'll say that for
her."

" She has so."

" I'm too thin," announced Edna. " I'd do anything
to put on weight, but I can't."

" Oh, would she ?" thought Miss Simkins.

" There's a pretty one on page 6. I made it for a client
at Strathfield last week. She was delighted with it.
Very wealthy people."

" That's the one I like."

" But it's too old for you."

" Oh, no, mother, I look simply poisonous in girlish
clothes. It's my height."

142 THE PERSIMMON TREE

" But you needn't look as if you were thirty. Need
she, Miss Simkins ?"

" My gracious, no."

" I know what I want. Mother."

" She has always known what she wanted ever since
she was a baby. The thing is, is there enough stuff?
I got five yards."

" Well, five yards would be very bare. Um — yes
those sleeves do cut into it. I'd have to have some joins."

" I hate joins," said Edna, passionately.

" You could have the collar and different sleeves."

" I suppose you haven't got 'Vogue' ?"

" Well, no, Miss Bowker. I don't get 'Vogue'. You
wouldn't believe how much those books cost."

" I do think 'Vogue' is so chick."

She looked intently at the illustrations. Would she
really look like that if Miss Simkins copied the dress ?
She was always filled with an agony of hope when the
dressmaker came, but she had never got exactly what
she wanted. Not exactly.

" If," she said dreamily, " I could only have a little
feather hat like that."

" We might see," said Mrs. Bowker. " We'll price
them. Mr. Bowker," she explained, " thinks the world
of his girlies. He likes them to look their best. What I
say to him is, he won't have the privilege of buying
their clothes for long. Edna's as good as engaged now."

" Mother," cried Edna, " you shouldn't say that,
there's nothing fixed."

" I only said "as good as'." Edna plunged down among
the fashion books. She tried not to hear her mother.
She couldn't imagine why she felt so uncomfortable.

Mrs Bowker lowered her voice, presumably that the
spirit of romance, now hovering over the house, might

THE DRESSMAKER 143

not take fright. " Such a nice young fellow. He'll have
plenty by and bye. He's got his car and all that now."

" How nice," said Miss Simkins.

" Edna's had plenty of chances, but this time it's
serious. Alan is mad about her. Everybody has noticed
it. So you see we want to make a special effort with her
clothes."

Miss Simkins saw perfectly. She bit off a length of
cotton.

The maid brought in morning tea. " I think morning
tea is a mistake," said Mrs. Bowker. " It spoils lunch."
Miss Simkins couldn't help hoping there would be some-
thing worth spoiling. Her early breakfast had been a
very ghostly affair. For the present there was thin
captain biscuits, buttered but rather soft.

" Do mind the butter," cried Mrs. Bowker in an agony
of anxiety.

Edna wandered out into the kitchern and returned
with a slice of cake in one hand, and a tart in the other.
" I'm always eating," she said, laughing it off.

The machine whirred, Mrs. Bowker ran in tackings,
Edna still sat hunched over the fashion books. She was
looking at wedding dresses, and her lips moved as if she
were telling herself a story. " There's some finishing
you can do, Edna," said her mother. " U-um — half
minute," answered the girl.

Miss Simkins was turning the Bowkers over in her
private mind. She supposed they were a happy family.
They all^ thought a lot of one another. But she really
couldn't see why. They weren't very exciting, were they?
She had seen Mr. Bowker. He had a brick red face and
very thick, red eyebrows. She supposed Mrs. Bowker
had been romantic about him once. Edna's young man
they were so pleased about, was probably ordinary too.

144 THE PERSIMMON TREE

Really, some people got everything very easily. It didn't
matter a bit that Mrs. Bowker was stout and stupid and
rather mean too, or that Edna was spoilt and affected,
or that everything about them was utterly, overwhelm-,
ingly commonplace. They had one another, they had
Mr. Bowker, a man, to fend for them. It made all the
difference.

Mrs. Bowker went on talking. " My son says. . . . My
husband. . . Our girlies. . Edna .... Joycie. . . . My
son . . . My hubbie . . . ." It wasn't necessary to
hsten. Miss Simkins knew all that — from the outside.

Then it was lunch time. Miss Simkins gave two pokes
to her hair, shook the cottons from her skirt^ and they
went into the cold, rather dark, dining-room. Miss
Simkins looked round the table and her heart sank. It
was corned beef and carrots. Miss Simkins had noticed
that it was always either corned beef or sausages — ^never
a roast or fillet steak or boiled chicken or fried sole — ^but
it was a mistake to think of these things for they made
the corned beef, with its rind of thick, yellow fat and its
mottled, brownish flesh, (bought ready cooked at the
smaUgoods shop, she knew) and the hot carrots, smelling
of earth, lying beside the cold meat on the warm plate,
seem even more unappetising than it was. People must
think that dressmakers liked corned beef and sausages
above everything else. No, it wasn't that. People didn't
think at aU, that was the hardest part to bear.

Edna, it appeared, was not going to have corned beef.
She had a chop instead. She explained that it was left
over from last night, and it would be a pity to waste it.
It did not look at all left over, but was fresh and juicy
with a rich grayy mottling the plate. It smelt most
appetising too, and when Edna put a lump of butter on

THE DRESSMAKER 145

top of it, peppering it well, that chop fairly took hold
of Miss Simkins' imagination.

Neither, it turned out, was Mrs. Bowker going to have
corned beef. She never took meat more than once a day,
and they were having a nice little stuffed shoulder for
dinner. The corned beef, it was obvious, had been bought
entirely for Miss Simkins — a quarter of a pound. Mrs.
Bowker had lettuce, and cheese, and brown bread, and
some stewed apple with the cream off the milk. She
needed, she said, something nourishing, she ate so little.
They ought to be glad they had their appetites. Edna said
mother ate nothing, and she was glad Miss Simkins was
there because often she felt such a beast, eating a hearty
lunch while mother just pecked. Mrs. Bowker's delicacy
did not show, however, unless it was in her habit of look-
ing intently, and rather suspiciously at every piece, of
food before she took it on her plate.

Miss Simkins' heart rebelled against the corned beef.
She longed to say that she didn't eat it, but she was
hungry, and there did not appear to be anything else.
Besides, it would be rude. Mrs. Bowker would probably
remember it against her, and not send for her again. She
put a small piece of meat in her mouth. It lay cold and
dead on her tongue. It seemed utterly alien. It was very
stupid and very gross to feel so keenly about food. But
she did. She could have wept.

Lunch over. Miss Simkins felt more cheerful, despite
herself. Also the sun had reached the glassed-in verandah
and it was now bright and pleasant. The warmth brought
a familiar, friendly, oily smell out of the sewing machine
and the light was better. Edna had a fitting. She dis-
liked being fitted, because Miss Simkins had cold hard
fingers, and because she stood so close that she could
feel her breath on her neck, her bare arms, her cheek.

146 THE PERSIMMON TREE

She could see Miss Simkins' scalp, greyish white, through
her course, dun-coloured hair. She could see the enlarged
pores on her nose and she hated it. She hated having
anybody touch her, except her own people — or Allan.
She stood like a dummy while her mother and Miss
Simkins argued over the dress.

" Well, Mrs. Bowker, that was how we always did it
at Summerhayes in London — on the right side. You'll
see when it's finished it'll look all right. M. Pitot would
have taken a fit if anyone had done it different. They
never do in France."

Mrs. Bowker was impressed. Even she had heard of
Summerhayes in London.

" Well," she said, " I suppose you know. Miss Simkins.
Only I was taught different. Not that I'm much of a
hand at sewing. With four children, one has just to do
the best one can and do it quickly. I never knew you were
at Summerhayes."

" Why, yes, Mrs. Bowker, I had a very good position
there. I was with them for ten years, and I rose to be
head of one of the rooms. Not the fitting, that was
M. Pitot. I used to do all the trimming and finishing,
and dresses were trimmed in those days — before the war.

" Fancy," said Mrs. Bowker, and, after a pause : " I
wonder you left it to come out here."

" I never thought I'd come to dressmaking by the day,
I never did. You see I left to get married. I had a great
disappointment. I think you can take it off now, Miss
Bowker. Mind the pins. It was all very strange how it
came about. More like a novel than real life, I always
say. My romance, I mean."

Miss Simkins laughed self-consciously, and Mrs. Bowker
said " Fan~cy," again.

THE DRESSMAKER Ul

" I was at Summerhayes and I used to take my fort-
night's holiday in August. This particular August I \\ ent
away \\-ith another of the young ladies to a place in
Norfolk. \A'e used to go boating on the Broads with a
gentleman acquaintance we made, and one day we had
an accident. There was a boat coming towards us with
several yoimg men in it, and one of them played the fool,
and well — somehow or other thej" ran into us and we
capsized. I couldn't swim a stroke and I reall}' think I
would have been drowned if one of the strange young
gentlemen hadn't jumped in and rescued me. I was wet
through, of course, and rather frightened. Dear, he was
in a way about me. He put his coat round me and rowed
me to the landing stage as fast as he could. Then he got
a cab and took me and my friend home. You wouldn't
beheve how handsome he looked with his w et hair plast-
tered to his forehead, and his shirt clinging to his broad
shoulders. He came the next day to see how I was, and
the day after that. And then we started going out for
walks together, and I hardly saw anjiiiing of my friend
for the rest of the hohdaJ^ She was quite snappy about
it, I remember."

" Excuse me, Miss Simkins, but you won't forget
we're having the collar two inches TOder than the pat-
tern ?"

*■ No, 1 haven't forgotten, Mrs. Bowker — this is the
cuff. I went back to London and so did he. He w as in
an office not far away from the shop and we saw one an-
other a lot. He was mad about me, Mrs. Bowker."

"It's too Uke a book," thought Edna. " I don't be-
heve it. "

" It seems he didn't Uke being in an office, and he had
great ideas of coming out to Austraha and farming. He
had some money, but his people didn't hke the idea of

148 THE PERSIMMON TREE

him leaving England. Well, I backed him up. There
are too many clerks in London. It was up to him to do
more with his life than that. I do believe in ambition,
don't you, Mrs. Bowker ?"

" Why, yes. I always say to my boy "

But this was Miss Simkins' hour, she swept on. " Arthur
thought a lot of my judgment. He said if I'd marry him
he'd be ready for anything. So we were engaged, and he
took me to see his mother and sister but they were very
stiff with me. You see, they thought I was stealing
Arthur and influencing him to leave England. I was all
for marrying and coming out with Arthur, but he said
no, he'd have a home for me first. He wasn't going to
have me roughing it. He was a very chivalrous nature
and he couldn't bear me to have so much as a finger ache."

" No, Elaine," he said, " I'll have to earn you first."
(" My name's Elaine. My mother was very romantic.
The Lily Maid of Astolat, you know.")

Edna couldn't help looking at the mole on Miss Sim-
kins' chin, with its little fountain of hairs.

" After a year Arthur wrote for me to come. He was
doing better than he expected, and had a little home
ready for me. His property was out from Goulbum,
very good land, and he'd had a good season. (I had all
my linen ready and a lot of other things.) I spent all my
savings on an outfit and things for the house, and Summer-
hayes' gave me my wedding dress. M. Pitot designed it
himself, so you see what they thought of me."

" My," said Mrs. Bowker politely.

" At Melbourne there was a wire for me, but when I
got to Sydney, no Arthur. I didn't know what to do,
and while I was waiting on the boat hoping he'd come,
I got a telegram from the matron of the hospital at
Goulbum to say Arthur was there and had met with an

THE DRESSMAKER 149

accident. I caught the train that night and arrived in
the early hours of the morning. I found my poor lad very
ill. It was all on account of me he'd been hurt, for he
was so anxious to have everything ready for me that he
worked on into the night, tidying up the place. In the
dark he stumbled on -an axe and it cut deep into his leg.
There was no one to help him, and he would have bled
to death if he hadn't managed to tie up the artery some-
how. By morning his leg was in such a state he could
not move it. The neighbour, who had promised to feed
his horse while he was away, came over two days later —
the day he was to have come to Sydney for me — and found
him delirious, with his leg black and swollen. He hurried
him to hospital, and the matron wired me.

" Arthur was terribly changed. His face looked small
like a child's, and his eyes, two black pits in it. They
had to amputate his poor leg, but that didn't do him
any good. He wasted and wasted. They were kind to
me at the hospital, and let me stay with him. (He
wanted so much to get better, and even when he was at
his worst he knew me.) One day he said, " I want to
make my will, Ellie. Will you get me a lawyer ?" But
I laughed and said, " Plenty of time for that. You'll
only have to make another as soon as you're married."
I didn't want him to think he was dying, you see. He
didn't ask again, and that afternoon he said he was feeling
better and had less pain, but in the night, at two o'clock,
he died."

Miss Simkins was sitting quite still with her hands in
her lap, looking out of the window. Edna felt terribly
uncomfortable. Mrs. Bowker was embarrassed too, and
thought she really ought to suggest that Miss Simkins
went on with her work.

150 THE PERSIMMON TREE

" I was very ill with grief and shock myself then, and
when I got better I'd no money left, and no claim on
anything of Arthur's. His mother thought if it hadn't
been for me he'd have been alive still, so she had the
land and our little house sold and didn't give me any-
thing."

Miss Simkins fell to machining again. Mrs. Bowker
and Edna looked at one another.

The dress was finished and Miss Simkins had gone
before Joyce came home from school. She was a fair,
leggy girl, full of vitality and curiosity. Even the
advent of the dressmaker seemed to her an incident
out of which some excitement could be squeezed. She
began to pester her mother with questions. " How did
Miss Simkins get on ? Did she bring some nice fashion
books ? Did she have any news ?"

" Well, she talked a lot," said Mrs. Bowker.

" What did she say ? What did she say ?" cried Joyce,
jumping up and down.

" She told us the story of her life," answered Mrs.
Bowker, beginning to smile.

" Did she have an exciting Ufe ?"

" I'm afraid not."

" What happened ?"

" The usual thing," Edna cut in. " She nearly got
married, but not quite."

" She talks too much," said Mrs. Bowker. " I don't
think we can have her again."

Miss Simkins went home happy. Always when she had
told her story she had a sense of exaltation. She had
had romance, even if she hadn't been able to keep it.

THE DRESSMAKER 151

She couldn't help thinking that there was something
fine about her tragedy. It was more beautiful than the
commonplace happiness of mediocre people.

Tonight she was going to give herself a little treat.
She bought a portion of steamed chicken, a paper bag
of potato crisps, a punnet of strawberries, and a little
carton of mixed nuts.

" Why not ?' she asked herself, defiantly.

152 THE PERSIMMON TREE

DRY SPELL

I walked because there was no reason for stopping,
because it was more intolerable to stay still, and because
I wanted to reach the sea. I wanted to wade out into
the water and perform some ritual act — like the Doge
wedding Venice to the Adriatic, or WilUam the Con-
queror with his hands full of symbohc mud, or Cuchulain,
or McDouall Stuart rushing into the Indian Ocean when
he had crossed the continent, or Cortes greeting the
Pacific — ^but was that Pisarro, or was it somebody else
altogether, Drake perhaps ? My mind caught painfully
on the doubt like a plane running on a knot of hardwood.
It upset me. I began rubbing my hand across my chin
again, and listening to my footsteps. The things I had
not been thinking came closer.

I was coming into the city along Anzac Parade. It
was late and quiet. Occasionally a tram passed, an empty,
illuminated box, leaping on the rails under a crackle of
blue sparks. The trees were black, and their leaves
made a little dry sound like ghostly butter pats. There
were no soft, rounded, sounds in the night, only dry
brittle ones, and the pavement was gritty under my
feet. My lips tasted of dust as they always did. The
torrid street lamps were like sores on the. night.

Walking alone at night always stimulated my imagina-
tion and now I was exalted as if with fever. But it was
the city's fever, not mine. Images, like the empty, lit
tram, ran through my mind and I was aware, with a
febrile intensity, of my surroundings, immediate and
remote.

It was the third waterless summer, and the heat had
come down like a steel shutter over the city. The winters

DRY SPELL 153

between had been as bad. Dry, with a parching, un-
slacked cold ; westerly winds that drove and drove,
bringing such clarity to the air, that a hill five miles
away looked near enough to touch. The drought was in
everything now, penetrating and changing life like blind
roots at work upon a neglected pavement. The colours
and quality of the world had been altered in the long
months of desiccation. The pattern of existence was
pulled awry.

Around the city there was a great fan of desolation.
The sun had beaten the Emu Plains to a black brown on
which the isolated houses and the townships themselves
drifted like flotsam on a dead sea. The mountains were
not blue but purple, a waterless ridge of rocks and
shadows with the vegetation, except in the deepest
seams of the valleys, mummified and black. Beyond again
the Bathurst Plains were like a petrified sea, and very
quiet. Further west, in an eternity of their own, were
the iron-hard, fissured Black Soil Plains. There was no
green anywhere. The stock had been driven away to
agistment over the border long ago. Or had died. There
was nothing even for the crows, who last year had had
their saturnalia.

The country with its endless, aching death pressed in
on the city, the drought and the heat pressed on both.
In the city and its environs its stamp was no less clear.
The bush on the outskirts was more than half dead.
Even the deep feeders, the black butts and the hke, were
d5ang. The life that was left was drawn in and banked
down, muted and secret. The scrub was shabby and
colourless. Fire had licked through it, leaving patches of
black and sharp red-brown. Where there were houses,
wide fire breaks had been cut as the only protection.
Water could no longer be relied on to combat the fires.

154 THE PERSIMMON TREE

These breaks were raw scars, even on the devastated
country. They looked like the trail of vengeance. Orchards
were long since dead, and the trees fallen on the eroded
ground. On the eastern slopes around Dural the orange
trees were burnt black. The flats that used to be vege-
table gardens were bare, the last dried stalks blown
away. Even Chinamen could make nothing grow.

In the wealthy suburbs of the North Shore and Vaucluse
a change had taken place too. It was as if the earth had
been squeezed so that all the fine houses that had nestled
so comfortably in the contours and in the greenery,
were forced up into the light. They bulged out, exposed,
and the sun tore at them. The gardens that had em-
bowered them were perished. Tinder dry, fire had been
through many of them, scorching walls and blistering
away any paint that remained. Most of these houses
were empty or inhabited as if they were caves, by people
who had come in from the stricken country. The owners
had fled, not so much from present hardship, as from the
nebulous threat of the future, the sense of being trapped
in a doomed city. The shores of the harbour were Uon-
coloured or drab grey. Sandhills showed a vivid whiteness.
Only the water was ahve and brilUant. And it was salt.

In the crowded districts, there was less to perish, but
light and air were equally abrasive, changing aU surfaces,
fading and nullifying all colour. There was no pleasure
of touch left anjnvhere, for the dust was undefeatable.
It pulled down pride and effort. The suburbs sagged
under an intolerable burden.

I was perpetually aware of all this. It cumulated into
a black wave which hung over me in threatening suspense.
Nothing that I knew had escaped. From my windows I
looked over the golf course and that had taken, because
it was defenceless, the clearest print of all. Its silvery

DRY SPELL L55

green hills were stripped to pale brown and tawny purple.
The earth was like starved, sagging flesh on an iron
skeleton. Here and there a fire had run for a few yards
before it died for lack of tinder, and left a black smear
with a little edging of white ash. I used to think that the
desert of Arizona looked like that. Now I know that
heat and drought can bring even the gentlest country
to it.

There was a man walking in front of me that I hadn't
noticed before. When he passed a lamp I saw that he
was a different shape from the pedestrians you'd expect
to see about there. He was a swaggie all right with his
roll of old blue blanket across his shoulders, and his
quart pot dangling from it. I overhauled him.

" Good-night, mate."

" 'Night, mate," he answered, as a bushman answers
the gate-crashing townsman. He was an old-timer,
might have been a fossicker, short and spare, with a
wealth of grey whiskers and clothes subdued to use and
wont as only a bushman's can be.

" Come far?" I asked him.

" Middlin' far."

" Where's that ?" I felt an insatiable curiosity.

" Back o' beyond."

I'd seen hundreds Hke him but here there was a sort
of long range persistance that was impressive. His
gaunt and bristling dog at heel was cut out of the same
stuff. My imagination took a leap.

" Did you ever do a perish on the Diamantina ?"

" Aye', there and more places besides."

" And now the track runs through the city?"

He didn't answer. So that was the way of it. I felt
coldly sick. Looking back over my shoulder I saw that
there were others, many of them, moving singly among

156 THE PERSIMMON TREE

the trees, all with the same intent, converging, persis-
tance. It would be the same on all the other highways.
I took to the middle of the road and, almost, to my heels.

I reached Taylor Square ahead of them. The neon
signs were sizzling, and a few shop windows still bulged
with Ught on the indifferent night. There were hardly
any people about, but in the narrow, crowded streets at
the bottom of the hOl there were plenty, sitting on door
steps or on chairs dragged out on to the pavement.
Children were playing languidly in the street because it
was too hot to go to bed. There was a queue at the pump,
with buckets and kerosene tins and even jugs.

There was still water in the pipes, brownish stuff with
a smell, but the pressure was so poor that it didn't reach
the higher levels, so the pumps had been put in where
people could come and get it. The city hadn't been used
to queues, and they were changing peoples' outlook.
They made new channels for rumour, perhaps for thought.

So many things were different, and the men's minds
with them. Unemployment was general either directly
from scarcity, or from its by-product of apathy. Idleness
was everywhere and the people were differently distri-
buted. \Vhole districts were almost depopulated whilst
others were overcrowded to suffocation. Practically aU
the food had to be brought in. The Government was
distributing it as a ration. There was enough, and yet
it didn't slake the public appetite. There was a sense of
famine. Even those who were eating better than ever
before, felt it. The whole of our civilization was piled
up hke a pyre waiting for the fire to consmne it.

The cit\- seethed with rumours and with the promulga-
tors of fantastic schemes, but everyone was fatalistic about
the drought. They didn't expect it to break, they even
took an inverted pride in it. It, at least, reUeved them

DRY SPELL 157

of the responsibility of living their own lives. There
was always a crowd at the General Post Office reading the
bulletins that were posted hourly, but no one believed
the jargon of lows, depressions and tropical disturbances,
any more than they beUeved in the bona fides of the clouds
that often blanketed the sky — as on this night— with
their barren oppression. Yet nothing else mattered. All
interest in outside events had been discarded, as if it
were the most obvious of luxuries. It was obvious that
something must come sooner or later of this mass tension,
but no one knew what. It was like a long thunderstorm
that did not break. Apathy and exasperation were
racing one another.

I followed the tramline out of the hot and odorous
streets. The open space beside the Blind Institute and
the Domain beyond were crowded with people in search
of air. They were quiet, bivouaced for the night, but
never quite still. There was no grass to sit on, only
dusty earth. The Botanic Gardens were the same, ruined
between the drought and the tramphng people. Authority
had long ago given up the thankless task of conserving
them.

I no longer wanted to get to the water. These febrile
cravings died easily. I was just drifting. Did it matter
what I did, or where I went with those old-timers closing
in ? The narrow canyons of the city offered no relief.
There was nothing for the mind to feed on but nostalgia.
I remembered Macquarie Place, and had a vision of it
as it used to be, the three-cornered garden, the giant
Port Jackson figs, dark against the pale soaring buildings,
the zinnias, the cushiony buffalo grass, the statue, (I
forget its original), declaiming to the street, the anchor of
the Sirius on a pedestal, Macquarie's obelisk in its bear
pit In the early days the officers and the higher

158 THE PERSIMMON TREE

officials lived round there. It was their compound where
the children romped in safety, and in the evening the
regimental band played under those same trees, lovers
counted the southern stars between the leaves, and the
gaiety of exiles flourished by candlelight. It was the
outpost of something that had had to fall, and it might
be again. It was a goal, a place with significance in a
meaningless desert, a spot where we might turn at last
and resist the invasion, the perishing men who came so
quietly and surely through the dust. I hastened my
steps like a hungry man who half remembers some for-
gotten fragment of food, and hurries back to ransack
his belongings once more. Down I went through narrow,
twisting streets, between buildings glowing with heat,
but dead to light.

At first sight Macquarie Place did not seem to be
greatly changed. The trees stiU stood, and the lights
showed the dark labyrinth of their leaves scarcely
breeched. It was, like all these places, crowded with
people. I had the good fortune to find a seat on one of
the benches. I was shaking with fatigue. All about me
were points of light from cigarettes, and a murmur of
talking. Those crowds had their fits of talking and their
fits of silence. I turned to my neighbour and was sur-
prised to see that he was apparently in fancy dress,
white breeches, a tail coat, and a three-cornered hat.
He was small and sharp, but fine too. Before I could
speak to him he addressed me.

"This is nothing new. Sir, it happened before, and worse."

" Indeed ?" said I, not feeling comfortable.

" Not so much the drought — though that was bad
enough, even the parrots were dropping dead out of
the trees at Rose Hill — but the scarcity. You have no
conception. Sir, of what it was like then."

DRY SPELL 159

" Was that long ago ?" I asked, trembling.,

" Some time ago. There was the same talk then of
abandoning the settlement but I didn't hsten to it. I
hope no one listens now. Of course I've no authority
these days. But if I could hang on surely you could. It was
two and a half years before ships came from England
that time. I'd grieve to see my work thrown away now."

I got up hurriedly. " Good-night, Captain," I said.

" Captain-General." he corrected me.

A man buttonholed me. " I've been to the Observatory
every day but no one will listen to me. In the Book of
Revelations "

I broke from him. I hoisted myself on to the pedestal
and leaned against the anchor. That was something
solid. Two men below me were quarrelling quietly. I
tried to speak to them to tell them what would be happen-
ing to all of us soon. They both fell silent.

" That's right, mate," said a man beside me, whom
I had not noticed. " What we want's solidarity."

I tried to see his face. " Are you real ? " I asked.

He laughed, and called down to a friend, " Here's a
poor cove gone balmy."

There was a roar of laughter, and a screech came up.
" Don't laugh, you fools, repent."

I sat trembling with rage. Let it happen to them,
whatever it was. I wouldn't warn them.

Two men were talking over my head.

" There's a change coming."

" I've heard that before."

" It's true this time."

" I don't hold with this metterology. It never did
anything for us."

"I don't neither. I know this myself. Smell it, see ?
You listen, it'll begin anytime."

160 THK CKKSIMMON' I «KK

" I'll wait."
" J- col that '<"

" Nopf;."

The country was coming to take its vengeance <m the
city. Climax. Apotheosis. Then nothing. Come quickly,
r,omf; quickly. All ugliness, all corruption will he burned
away,

"Feel that ? "

" Something fell on my bakl pate,"

" Rain."

" (.(, on,"

LISTEN

Silence fell. There was a crepitation among the leaves.
Everybody storwi up, stfK;k still. 1 slid from the ped'Atal
and stood with them. T felt the drops on my fare. I
was furioas, nothing could hold rnc-.

" N'o," I shouted. It could)i't corne now. It was iiy<>
late, <^>ur fate was on us. We were gmng up in fir*:,
con.summated. It was agr/ny to tiirn ba/,k now with the
end we had toilf;d sf; long to reach in sight.

There were iM-/)p]i: holding me. " It isn't tnje," I cried.
" ft won't happen. No rain ever,"

Someone forced me to my knees. There was a great
silent ring of perjple around me, A match was ,struck
and held in a cupped hand. I stared at the asphalt.
Great black drof..s were falling on it, drying, disappearing,
coming again, faster and faster, making a pattern like
the leaves against the light, then coalescing and defacing
itself, I st-ATtA and stared, (hit on the roads, that
pattern was tangling the feet of thfr jj<-rishing men,
turning them back. Notfiing would atmi; of it now,
.Nothing would .save us. We mast take up the burden of
remaking our wr^rld.